We now have JERK in the software. Jerk is basically the rate of increase of acceleration (like acceleration is the rate of increase of speed). To better understand it imagine you are in a car which suddenly accelerates. At the start you will push back in the seat so your personal acceleration will be delayed. In a robot this is when all the elasticity in the drive is taken out before actual acceleration can begin. Its worst manifestation is when the robot stops e.g. to grip something. Deceleration stops but the robot moves on before bouncing back. So with JERK this deceleration tapers off resulting in a smooth stop. The other new feature is you can program a special deceleration for emergency stop. We are not interested in precision in this case, we just want to stop as soon as possible. All this is now version 17 of RoboForth. I have developed the finest robot software on the planet and that's it. No more.

Our two students, Kazuo and Aaryaman this year did an amazing job creating a robotic dog. They both achieved Nuffield Research Placements scheme and the British Science Association Gold CREST awards.

A robot dog may sound simple but it was a major engineering exercise requiring CAD mechanical design, electronics and software including some quite difficult problems for example, synchronism of leg motors. What was especially satisfying was seeing them collaborate often disagreeing yet always talking through problems and agreeing a solution. When they encountered a problem I would do no more than suggest a solution or a particular component or give them the tools they needed (e.g. digital oscilloscope). They would then dive in and leave me behind with their thinking. They were creative and true problem solving engineers. They will go far.

Oh and guess what they named it: K9 !

wow, really old video of Joseph Engelberger and one of the first industrial robots on the Johnny Carson show. https://web.archive.org/web/20120113174852/http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yKo6KMkuVAk

15th June 2016:

Another successful day at Duxford showing the students how to build and program robots
Our people left to right: Kyle, 'DJ', Kutlo.

27 Steps

Interesting approach by Nish Kothari & Anesta Iwan in San Francisco:

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/zoe-me-robotic-relationship-nish-kothari?trk=hp-feed-article-title-like

They operated our robot remotely over Webcam and Telnet and had a unique experience. They named the robot Zoe and we are adopting that name too!

strange videos on Vimeo

I had a visitor last week for a quick demonstration and they filmed the demo. For some reason they posted the videos on Vimeo

It's now on youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P41FQnX6Mxw

Successful completion of Nuffield and Crest Award projects by two students

STEM Team East arrange summer placements for students across the whole of Anglia region. ST Robotics facilitated a summer research project for Frances Conboy from Hills Road College, Cambridge and Xiaoding (Tom) Lu from the Perse School, Cambridge.

The project they chose was a simplified Cubli device and was probably too ambitious but they did a great job.

Left to right: the students Francis and Tom discussing the engineering principles with ST Robotics' intern, Kutlo Kebaikanye from Cambridge University.

The students then had to display posters on their projects at the Nuffield ceremony held at Anglia Ruskin University campus. Frances was awarded her Nuffield certificate and Tom gained his Crest Award.

This is Frances explaining the project to visitors.

Tom explaining the project to visitors