Dr Mark Judge

This paper details lessons learned from the implementation of a new approach to first-year Electronic and Electrical Engineering undergraduate laboratory teaching at the University of Sheffield (UoS), UK. Having moved from traditional small group laboratory teaching to much larger group teaching, a number of issues have been identified. With the construction of a new faculty-wide engineering building came a new undergraduate practical teaching paradigm. In this paper, the rationale behind the new model is introduced. Details of the laboratory teaching materials and exercises are also given. An analysis is presented of the experience gained during the first academic year’s delivery. Finally, suggested improvements are discussed.

International Erasmus (EU) ALIOT Program Summer school on curriculum development on IoT for industry and human applications for academia and industry cooperation.

A detailed evaluation of the attitudes to technology will demonstrate that for progress to be made, the NHS, and the general public of the UK, must re-evaluate perceptions of value and worth.

This work sets out to explore the supporting role an intelligent robotics system might play in gathering and processing the initial data from fire incidents. Initial findings from this developing project indicate that having a continually updating map of internal conditions improves accuracy of route planning and potentially the ability of crews to reach casualties and stabilise the building with increased efficiency.

It may not be a commonly held belief but nevertheless The NHS Has Enough Money. There may be an outstanding deficit of £531m in the past financial year (2019) but the argument will be raised and evidenced that it is not an insufficiency of capital but ill-advisedly applied resources that have resulted in the NHS languishing in a perpetual fiscal quagmire. In the course of this analysis, some of the causes of the NHS’s financial tribulations will be assessed and evaluated. Particular attention will be given to how healthcare innovation is developed and distributed in other countries specifically those who face resource constraints. A comparison will be made between NHS innovation and that which is found in BRIC economies and other developing nations and the effectiveness, efficiency and cost of these will be contrasted. A detailed evaluation of the attitudes to technology, specifically telemedicine and telehealth, in the UK and India will demonstrate that for progress to be made the NHS, and the general public of the UK must re-evaluate perceptions of value and worth. Finally, this report will demonstrate that for the NHS to thrive or even survive will require an evolution in philosophy and actions, emulating the frugal practices observed in BRIC economies and other developing nations. It will be shown that the wasteful ways of the NHS are causing multiple problems that will only be overcome through radical systemic change and progression.

This paper lays down the foundations of developing a reconfigurable control system within the Robot Operating System (ROS) for autonomous robots. The essential components of robots are programmed under a ROS system. A formal model is defined as a tripartite graph to represent the robots functional architecture. ROS systems are then generalised to component libraries for any ROS architecture and an abstract model as a "system graph" is introduced. Orthogonality of a library and a system graph is defined and redundancy levels of robot components are studied for maintaining full functionality of the robot by automated reconfiguration in face of hardware malfunction. This allows AI planning tools, such as Planning Domain Definition Language (PDDL), to compute permissible reconfigurations. We present an example of a pair of robotic arms which requires reconfiguration of the underlying control system in order to retain the capability to carry out a task.

Language Editor.