On 25 November, Her Royal Highness The Princess Royal came to the College Lane campus to formally open Spectra, the University of Hertfordshire's new £100 million building and the new home of the School of Physics, Engineering and Computer Science. A university builds towards a day like that for years, and I had the honour of being on the floor for it, presenting the robotic football platform our STRIDE team has been developing.
The visit was hosted by Professor Daniel McCluskey CEng, Dean of SPECS, who guided Her Royal Highness through the building's facilities, alongside Vice-Chancellor Professor Anthony C Woodman and Chancellor Grace Ononiwu CBE, with the Lord Lieutenant of Hertfordshire, Robert Voss CBE CStJ, in attendance. Her Royal Highness unveiled a plaque to mark the opening.
The day was covered by the Welwyn Hatfield Times, which reported Her Royal Highness congratulating the team on what they had achieved with Spectra and calling the building a "huge improvement" for the University. "I do hope the students all appreciate what this place represents," she added. Standing on the pitch while that was said about the building you work in is not an ordinary day at university.
Over the course of it I also had the opportunity to meet the High Sheriff of Hertfordshire, Nicholas Buxton; the Police and Crime Commissioner for Hertfordshire, Jonathan Ash-Edwards; the Mayor of Welwyn Hatfield Borough Council, Councillor Lynn Chesterman OBE; and the Chief Constable of Hertfordshire Constabulary, Andy Prophet, along with a number of other distinguished guests.
Spectra had already been open and running for a year by then, which gives the occasion a particular character. This was not a ribbon cut on an empty building. It was a year of work in it being shown to someone, and every group in the School had to answer for what they had done with the place.
The platform
Our contribution was the robotic football platform: four ROBOTIS OP3 humanoids on the pitch, two a side, with a fifth person on the game controller.
The robots are partially autonomous. Each one tracks the ball and approaches it on its own, kicks with control rather than swinging at it, and returns itself to standing after a fall. That last capability is the one visitors notice, and on an occasion like this it is also the one that matters most. A humanoid that goes down and stays down has ended its own demonstration, and there is no graceful way to intervene in front of a royal party. Self-recovery is what allows the system to be shown honestly, at full pace, rather than nursed through a cautious routine.
On the day
A demonstration in a hall and a test in a lab are different engineering problems, and the difference is not the robots. It is that there is no pause. The pitch runs continuously, visitors arrive in waves, and whatever state a robot is in is the state in which it is seen. The work is watching for the small signals that precede a failure, and closing the gap quickly when one arrives. With four robots running at once, that is four people doing it simultaneously, on the same pitch, without crowding one another.
The audience made it a demanding room in the best sense. Beyond the official party there were professors, researchers and innovators from across the University, and visiting researchers representing institutions from several countries. They ask a sharper class of question than a general audience does: you are given the version that already understands where the difficulty lies, and you have to answer it properly.
The team
I am grateful to Karen Archer, our Team Lead, for the opportunity to represent the group's work on an occasion of this significance.
The demonstration took five of us:
- Athul Krishna Renjith, Robot 1 (Kevin)
- Sanchit Acharya, Robot 2 (Stuart)
- Martin Thuranira Baithalu, Robot 3 (Bob)
- Khant Zwe Naing, Robot 4 (Dave)
- Laban Mahihu, game controller
My thanks also to the University of Hertfordshire, and to the staff, students and organisers whose work made the day run as it did. The opening of Spectra is a genuine milestone for the University, and it was a privilege to contribute to it.