Open Day Reflections

How quickly the time has gone already nearly a month since La Trobe Uni Open Day.
We had about 7 engineering displays in total:
- The UAV
- The ROV
- A line tracking robot
- A Persistence of vision sign writer
- A traffic congestion Zigbee and GPS based monitoring system
- Some fancy image recognition for speed signs
- A waveform generator
When people walked in they were often really interested in moving things and interactive things - the POV and line tracking robot in particular attracted lots of attention. Unfortunately the ROV and UAV as cool as they are were simply static displays which weren't too exciting. Next year we will aim to have more interactive and visually stimulating projects, in particular some we have earmarked include:
- A hexapod insectoid robot
- A horizontal 3D POV display
- A PID balance beam or inverted pendulum
- My PhD research on SLAM (Simultaneous Localisation and Mapping)
- An active ROV display (people control the ROV)
- Mini-ROV's in a fish-tank (from the schools program)
- High altitude balloon research
- Quadrature rotor chopper