Jonathan Jamieson

SIR (Strathclyde Inspection Robot) was my final year group project. Designed by a team of four (3 electro-mechanical students and 1 mechanical student) it was a prototype robot capable of inspection a surface within a small space. When I say a small space, I really mean a small space. At its narrowest, the sample test piece was 32mm.

It was a good project to work on. I enjoyed working the electrical engineering department because at the time of doing the project there wasn’t much robotics being done in the mechanical department. I’ve been told by a few people that I am a closet electro-mechanical engineer!

Master Chief (360x speed)

The two most entertaining aspects of the past few day were PIM and the rediscovery of the Rubik’s Cube.

I learned how to solve the cube during 6th year of school. My average solve time used to be about 2 minutes and 30 seconds (not very fast at all). So far I’ve just been using my old method of solving which is not particularly efficient. Memorising algorithms is not my forte but I’d like to be a bit faster. It does make a great distraction from uni work!

Skiwalker nearly finished

Tomorrow will be the first day of the final semester of my Mechanical Engineering degree! 5th year has been alright, but I am desperate to end the cycle of exams then lectures and start working on something that “matters”. That something has not been decided yet but something in research and development would probably suit me best.

One of the most likely possibilities is a PhD with my fourth year dissertation supervisor, Dr Biggs. I’d like a mixture of simulation and physical experiments (that’s why I enjoy robots so much!). I have a few other options so I suppose I’ll find out what I’ll be doing by the end of the academic year (at least I hope I will!).

I’ve had a few days of free time since the exams finished. The first day I went mountain unicycling at Mugdock Country Park. It was a stark reminder how little exercise I have done in recent months but it was, nonetheless, very enjoyable. “Winter wonderland” would be an apt description of the conditions. The freezing temperatures did mean there was no time for long breaks, I ate my lunch at lighting speed. 2013 is hopefully the year I venture further afield with my unicycle. I would like to discover more of Scotland on it and meet more unicyclists.

For the rest of my post-exam free time I have been fixing up some of my old projects that really need finished. At the top-right is the newly rewired Skiwalker. It still needs optimising, I’d like it to go a bit faster but it sure looks neater. Finally, I rewired  a long running project, the Procrastination Illustration Machine (PIM). I need to work on the software side (generating coordinates) and I might even look at making a mechanism to bring the pen off the page. I don’t believe it’s reached it’s full potential yet, there are many more drawings that need to be drawn!

I’ve also been jotting down some ideas for possible projects to start in 2013. Hopefully some of them will be achieved! Updating this website wouldn’t be a bad idea either…

Master Chief

I still haven’t uploaded anything about my drawing machine so I thought I had better get round to it. It is still work-in-progress and I imagine it will be for the foreseeable future. I have got it into a state where it will draw, reasonably accurately and list of (x,y) coordinates. The fun/tricky/interesting part of these machines is converting an image to coordinates that look good once they have been plotted.

The main excitement of this week was a site visit to Sygenta as part of my group project. This year I have sneaked into an EME group because I had so much fun in the electrical department over the summer. We will be designing a robot inspection vehicle that needs to fit in a small (~20cm) gap. Unfortunately I don’t have any photos I can upload to my website just now from this trip but I will try and keep a record of it here.

The current setup. Obviously the giant flower wasn't done by my machine, I am just using it as support.

Summer unicycling at Mugdock Country Park

Well, so much for keeping my website up-to-date over the summer! I will cram a bunch of things that I’ve done in the holidays into this post. Despite not updating this website I have had a fairly productive and enjoyable time.

The paths of the robots

I spent most of my summer working as an intern at the university (of Strathclyde). I was based in the electrical department (they’ve got robots, Mechanical department doesn’t!) doing work on swarm robotics. The Centre for Ultrasonic Engineering (CUE) has a fleet of small robots that can be fitted with NDE (non-destructive evaluation) payloads such as cameras and ulatrasonic sensors. Currently, to perform a scan each robot needs to have its path way-marked, this is time consuming and prone to collisions. At the Applied Space Concepts Laboratory (Mech. Eng, University of Strathclyde) there has been a lot of work done on artificial potential functions (APFs) to control a swarm.  I used APFs to control the robots and continued work on applying the principles to enable a scan of a structure. I produced a poster at the end of my internship that covers the basic principles of what I did.

The internship was definitely one of the best things I’ve done at university. The opportunity to properly focus on something for a reasonable length of time (~10 weeks) and have some initial support before being left to my own devices was just what I wanted. I’ve coded and worked with electronics before but not as this level. Troubleshooting is a different experience when you are working with a complicated system that you didn’t develop and are new to. I am used to building from the ground up, so I have a good idea how each part works. This expectation and luxury is something I won’t always have, sometimes it’s just not feasible to know everything about a system. You need to read the documentation to interface with an existing platform.

Whether or not a research career is right for me is not something I have decided yet. However, I know I would like to play (I mean work) with robots again!

The robots arranged in a circle

Tomorrow I will start my summer internship at Strathclyde university. I will be doing research in the area of swarm robotics, I think. I’ve been given some papers to read by my supervisor which I just about get the gist of. I am hoping that once I get into the nitty-gritty things will make more sense. Robots have always interested me and if I can spend my summer controlling an army of them, well, it will be a good summer!

Initially the work will be based around MATLAB which suits me nicely because that’s the software I used for my fourth year. I’ve been warned that eventually C# programming might be needed. That will be interesting, it’s been a long time since I’ve used a C-like language and I was never particularly good with C.

The university has made a good effort to bring together all the interns that will be working over the summer. I pretty much only know (at university) fourth year, mechanical engineers, so I should probably try to broaden my horizons! I’ve been looking forward to this placement since the application was submitted. If I had been given a list of 100 projects, I reckon I would have picked this one. In 10 weeks time, I should know a lot more about swarm robotics and if research is the right career path for me.

I got a new mountain unicycle. I did have my heart set on a 29″ Kris Holm but I spotted a second hand 24″ Kris Holm on unicyclist.com. It came with a brake and the price was too low to resist. Thursday was the first chance I had to properly take it for a spin and it didn’t disappoint. The brake really takes some of the strain off your legs on downhill sections, I just hope I don’t become so reliant on it that I can’t ride a unicycle without a brake!

My dad followed me on his bike wearing a headcam, the video below is the result. The original video had quite a bit of shudder so I let youtube smooth it off. It succeeded but with the dreaded “jello” side-effect. I will experiment with deShaker soon and try and do a better job. Until then, this will have to do, enjoy!

So that’s the end of my fourth year at Strathclyde doing Mechanical Engineering. Just one more to go. The exams seemed to go without too many problems but I will have to wait until the results are released. The biggest part of the year was my individual project, simulating the motion of a snakeboard. I spent most of my time working with MATLAB before writing up a 12,000 word dissertation, which if I am being honest, I’ll be glad to never have to see again! For me, the best part of the project was creating an input device (shown to the left) which allowed the user to directly control the simulation.

I have a few weeks before I start my internship at the university. Already, I’ve made a pneumatic spud gun out of copper pipe. For something so small it is satisfying powerful. Just like water rockets, it’s one of those things that are so simple I can’t believe I haven’t made before. There is always the temptation to build bigger and better, a full size potato cannon would be awesome. However,  actually finding somewhere safe to fire anything larger than the baby gun I have just now would be difficult. Maybe an indoor DIY Nerf gun? Perhaps that’s not safe either… this one would be a better idea.

So far, I’ve never needed a portable boombox. Unfortunately that doesn’t stop me from wanting one! I have an old Panasonic cassette/radio that works but doesn’t have any way to plug in an MP3 player. Also, it runs off the mains or 6 C sized batteries. Who has that many batteries of that type?! Therefore, I plan to make a new case, get a big-ass battery and find a way to plug my MP3 player in.

Finally, I’ve bought a lovely new Moleskine notebook for my plans and schemes. What I need to do in the summer is convert  the ideas to reality. Annoyingly none of my ideas are suitable for birthday gifts to a friend whom I owe two. If only she had the same taste in interesting things that I do.

I did go to a unicycle and juggling shop before I left Korea!

Sadly I’m no longer in Korea It was great while it lasted! Fortunately the memories live on. It’s not finished yet (and it might take awhile) but I’ll have a little page of my website dedicated to my internship. In the meantime I’ve written a report about my experiences and what I did.

A big thanks to everyone that made my trip so amazing! Unfortunately, I accidentally deleted KakaoTalk and lost my username so please don’t send any messages to me on that because I won’t get them!

It won’t be long till university starts. I’m hoping to do my 4th Year Project on snakeboards… In the meantime I’ll adjust the much colder Scottish climate. When I stepped out Glasgow Airport in my shorts and t-shirt I thought I was going to freeze!

After enjoying my weekend of hiking, I decided to use my day off on Monday climb Bomunsun. Monday was a public holiday in Korea because it was Gwangbokjeol (광복절). Celebrated annually, this holiday commemorates the end of colonial rule on August 15, 1945.

The weather was fairly stable (we’ve been getting some very heavy downpours recently) but unfortunately it was very hazy. This obscured the views from the top a great deal which was disappointing.

Probably for that reason it wasn’t the greatest walk I’ve ever done but I still enjoyed the fresh air.