Trotted along to the mid-Wales BCS sub branch A.G.M. and lecture last night. AGM was a formality and as such appropriately boring, but at least lasted only 10 minutes.
Of much more interest was a talk by Prof. Dave Barnes on the work done by his Space Robotics Group. It some time since I was involved with making some of Dave's PhD student's code run faster as it took 6 weeks on a 20 way machine to run (we cut it in half by using Sun Studio rather than gcc and adding the -fast flag), so I really had little idea what he was doing. Well worth a read of his web pages. What really stuck me was the interdisciplinary nature of the work he does bringing together robotics, vision analysis, materials science are the ones which come to mind.
Using Clarach beach as a testing ground for some of the mobile robots is a little curious, but makes sense.
Bottom line is that Aberystwyth is a serious player (not quite NASA yet) in european space robotics.
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