The Musuem Lates Sessions is an initiative aimed at attracting an adult audience to the museum to hear about the latest innovations in the scientific world. They are very popular, often attracting more than 3000 visitors, and this is the second time the TPN has been involved.
A robotics lecturer from Harper Adams University, Sam Wane, spoke about technology advancements in agriculture.
In particular, Sam discussed the changing size of the tractor, and how the research taking place at Harper Adams hopes to develop lightweight agricultural robots to seed, weed, scout and harvest. He also spoke about new technologies such as unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), laser weeding and selective harvesting.
Sam said: "I was delighted to represent the university at the Science Museum's LATEST event. It gave me the opportunity to share our agricultural engineering work with an urban audience right in the heart of London".
Bots for Kids: Learning programming through playing with robots
In addition to Sam's presentation, another member of the executive team, Graham Deacon was in attendance with a presentation/demo about Ocado Technology's "Code for Life" initiative:
Graham Deacon is Robotics Research Team Leader at Ocado Technology and demonstrated a programming environment under development as part of Ocado's Code for Life initiative that allows users to program their own custom designed robot using the drag and drop language Blockly.
The environment is targeted at Key Stage 2 students and provides an interface to inexpensive commodity hardware including the Raspberry Pi, Arduino compatible sensors, and Lego Mindstorms sensors and motors. The intention is to encourage students to take up programming through exploring sensor-guided robot behaviour by providing an intuitive interface to a diverse range of hardware.
Graham commented that he was encouraged by the fact that the most common question he received was "When can we get our hands on it?".
Graham brought some Lego Technic based mobile robots with him so that folks could try them out for themselves.