As I write this I am nearing the last week of the first month of my PhD. It truly is amazing how fast a month can go – it is already half-term for my brother and sister! This month has been relatively unproductive in terms of actual PhD work; I spent a large portion of the month chasing up my funding and doing other generally boring administrative stuff such as induction meetings, registering, getting an office, desk, phone, computer, etc. I’ve also spent a significant portion of the month doing teaching duties – first a Perl course for 1st year students, then the marking of the assignment, usual demonstrating and I gave my first CS101 lecture this Friday past.
However, I have made a bit of a start on the PhD work. I’ve got a couple of books out the library which seem like they could be useful (I was further encouraged to see the same book on someone else’s desk, I must have made a good choice). I’ve also spent a fair bit of time finding papers relating to robotic navigation (generally from Space Robotics) and I read an interesting PhD thesis on autonomous scientific target identification for rovers on Mars (always a good idea to see what you’re ultimately aiming for). Otherwise, for the moment, I’ve spent a lot of time playing (by which I mean designing, ordering components and building circuit boards for the Argo; so I can actually do some research – honest).
I seem to have been in quite a number of meetings with people from the Geography department (who, despite having a reputation for colouring in maps seem [as you would hope] very knowledgeable, friendly and helpful) in an attempt to get a more concrete idea of the environment in Greenland that the Argo is likely to encounter. For the most part it sounds like there is little to worry about in March/April time; the melt season hasn’t (usually) started and any holes are usually snow covered to a point that they can support vehicles. However, we still don’t want to risk having an Argo drive down a Moulin and so in some respect, although the snow may seem like an advantage, it actually causes more problems; how do you identify a hole that isn’t there? Another reason for these meetings has been to identify exactly what it is that the Geography department are interested in, in terms of scientific data. Whilst it is possible to do lots of ‘surface analysis’ (snow coverage, storm and weather analysis, etc) and to develop high detailed Digital Elevation Models or DEMs (we’ve talked about tethered balloons with sensor equipment mounted, laser scanners, IR, camera systems, etc) they are much more interested in what is underneath the ice. So, at the moment, there is still a considerable amount of work to be done to identify which sensors we will and will not be installing on the Argo for deployment.
More recently I’ve been having some interesting ideas about other fun things to do with the Argo. In particular (and highly related to other research being undertaken at Aberystwyth within the Intelligent Robotics Group) I would like to try and have a go at getting some kind of developmental learning algorithm on the Argo so that it can learn its own capabilities and learn to drive.
For the next month I’m going to be pretty busy sorting out the Argo, though I would very much like to start writing some of my thesis. Whilst most people I have spoken to seem to suggest it is very hard to complete a PhD in the 3 years and they usually use the 4th year for writing up, I would like to complete my PhD on time! So, looks like I’ve got a lot of work to do. I’ll try and keep this blog updated, even if it is only once a month, it’s still better than last year – so far so good!
Until my next (hopefully more interesting) post!