About my Research
My research is primarily concerned with creating highly autonomous robots which will operate away from human contact for months or years at a time. I think that the main problem in making such robots is to make them able to adapt to changes in their environment. This includes changes in temperature, humidity, weather conditions, motor temperatures or batter levels. What i'm hoping to do is to mimic the ways that biological systems adapt to their environments and cope with changes to their environments. This will include mimicing the way the body reacts to changes in temperature and humidity changes, hunger, injury and infection.
To develop these idea's i've chosen to use a small sailing robot. This offers a realistic but cheap (and even expendable!) test platform. To date we've built two robots from scrap parts, the first intened to prove the feasability of the concept and the second to improve sailing ability and resolve many of the issues of the first. A third boat is currently being constructed by an industrial partner and is intended to be capable of remaining at sea for long periods of time.
I am currently involved in the Microtransat Competition which aims to race autonomous sailing robots across the Atlantic Ocean in late 2008.
The First Robot (built late 2004/early 2005)
The Second Robot (The ARC - Summer 2006)
