• Question: What is the most challenging engineering project that you have been involved with during the past year?

    Asked by finstar to Shruti, Mark, Faranak, Douglas, Charlene, Alistair on 1 Mar 2019.
    • Photo: Alistair McConnell

      Alistair McConnell answered on 1 Mar 2019:

      Taking the robots we built in our lab, combining them with other robots that can travel underwater and put our robots in on underwater objects and then having all of the robots talk to each other and to use to see what they are doing. Before finally getting the robots to retrieve the other robots.

    • Photo: Shruti Turner

      Shruti Turner answered on 4 Mar 2019:

      That has got to be one part of my PhD: I had a survey and had to get people who had lost their legs and their clinicians to answer so that I could design a technology that would be useful for them. I thought it would be easy to get people to respond to something super quick that would help them, but it was really difficult. Without their responses I wouldn’t be able to make this technology as good as it had the potential to be. It doesn’t sound like engineering, but it is the first part of an engineering project: doing the research to find out what the problem is and what the requirements of the solution are. Without this information, the project can’t really go further and be successful. It took me about 9 months to get enough responses to be useful and now I am starting to design the solution.

    • Photo: Mark Bentley

      Mark Bentley answered on 4 Mar 2019:

      The huge SkyGas project.

      Like a camera system on wires you see at big football stadiums or the Olympics, but it carry’s £250k of scientific gas analising equipment over a lake in Sweden

    • Photo: Faranak Bahrami

      Faranak Bahrami answered on 4 Mar 2019:

      I don’t work on many different projects, yet, because I’m still technically a student. I’m a doctorate student, which means I have my own project which has not been done before, so no one knows the answer to the problem yet, and I’m supposed to solve that problem (it works like this for most of the doctorate projects). So, in the end, when you finish your doctorate (3-4 years), you are going to be the world expert on that specific thing. But while you are doing it, there are loads of challenges, difficulties, and frustrations involved 🙂

      But one of the most difficult things that I had to do during the past year was learning a new computer program to a level that I could make a simulation that no one else has ever done before. It was very stressful and difficult.

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