Facilities

Dedicated robotics and communications laboratories, where students focus on industrial and intelligent robotic systems and high frequency electronics
Facilities

ROBOTs used in teaching:
  • 25 x Plymouth Nanobot – FPGA, Arduino, Pi controllable 2-wheeled robot for 1st/2nd years.
  • 12 x Plymouth Humanoids – 18 DF humanoids with Odroid 64-bit quad core processors, running own robot framework under Linux Ubuntu with OpenCV vision, and Atmel processor R/T gait controller, IMUs, mono camera, wifi link. Used for gait kinematics, and computer vision for 2nd /3rd year and MSc.
  • 21 x Plymouth OWL robot – stereo vision using Raspberry Pi computer board with twin OV5647 cameras. Links to host for vision analysis and servo control. Used for servo control, stereo vergence, disparity and saccadic eye modelling for 3rd year and MSc Robotics.
  • 10 x NAO robots for HRI for 3rd year.
  • 1 x Gummi ARM for soft robotics MEng final year and MSc Robotics.
  • 20 x complete Dynamixel 5-axis robot arms used for robotics teaching.
  • 1 x Baxter bi-manual robot with ROS interface (available for final year projects).
  • 3 x Mitsubishi industrial Pick&Place arms for 2nd year and MSc Robotics.
  • 15x pole-balancing robots for 2nd/3rd year for control theory.
  • 20 buggies for ‘Robot Software Engineering’ with Arduino Uno, Pi 3 and Android phones to support distributed development with ROS.
  • 40 e-pucks.
  • Six rapid prototyping printers supporting PLA, ABS, Nylon, conductive elastomer and other materials.
  • Solidworks CAD design and Modelling software available on over 30 workstations for robotics and electronics students.
             
Laboratory facilities include:
  • Printed Circuit Board (PCB) manufacturing with surface mount facility in-house allows you to construct professional quality six layer boards with state-of-the-art components.
  • We have a class 100 and a class 10 Clean Room. These form the Wolfson Nanomagnetics Laboratory - a cleanroom based laboratory for research and student projects in spintronics, nanotechnology, multifunctional material/devices and biosensors.
  • Our communications laboratory has a full range of industry standard high frequency (HF) test equipment. You will be able to build and test HF systems from discrete component level through to the interfacing multi-band communication chip-sets (Wi-Fi, Bluetooth) commonly used in consumer electronics.
  • We have mechanical workshop facilities including 3D printing and laser cutting.
  • For a hands-on student experience we offer full access to a suite of laboratories equipped with a range of power supplies, test equipment, soldering stations and computers with specialist software (Labcenter Electronics ‘Proteus Design Suite’ CAD package, National Instruments’ LabVIEW’, Altera ‘Quartus’, Mathworks ‘MATLAB’ and Keil ‘uVision‘ IDE).