So, Final year of Engineering at the University of Queensland.
Final Year to do something Interesting, and I’ve found it.
Project Summary: 150x60mm Quadrupedal robot with passive stability and minimal feedback, capable of speeds between .11 and 1.5m/s.
If you think it sounds difficult, you don’t know the half of it, but fortunately there’s a wealth of literature on both natural and robotic movement and stability to help me out. But therein lies the problem. It’s all just too damn interesting. I’ll be reading one paper, and it will reference another, and I’ll jump over to it, and the chain just goes on and on and on. Most of them are only peripherally related at best, but the interest factor keeps pulling me in, and in, and in. It’s probably the equivalent of someone who likes art looking through someones paintings, and the comment on one of them says “Inspired by XXXXX”, at which point they jump off and start looking at them.
Anyway, That’s not really the point. The point is I shouldn’t be doing that, or this, but I need some way to get thoughts out of my head and this is far more efficient than just posting on facebook.
I’ll be detailing my descent into madness whenever I hit a block in my writing, or thought process, so I’m sure whatever is detailed within will be interesting if somewhat incoherent.
Nathan M.
March 22, 2013
My advice, make sure you read the entire paper, before jumping to other things, make a list of them and whether they will be important immediantly for research, might be useful, or are just cool. You can also cut down what you read by reading the abstract and conclusion and figure out from that what’s worth reading and what is not.
I’m not exactly sure what papers are like in engineering, but I might have an advantage over you with regards to selection in that physics although its all interesting, it takes lots of time and effort to get anything out of a single paper. Also what things do you have to produce for this project?
George
March 26, 2013
Engineering Theses are essentially projects into some as of yet completed area of a relevant, and usually have an associated deliverable. The document itself is more of a methodology of how the project was done, relavent equations and background for understanding.
As for cutting down by just reading the abstracts/Summaries, I would love to do that. Except that I need specific sections of content from different papers in order to provide proof of concept and to improve my understanding
Nathan M.
March 26, 2013
By abstracts/summaries I mean to decide what is important enough to read to enhance your knowledge or would be a proof of concept.
I suspect this structure would be a bit different to any physics papers/reviews so I’m not so sure what it would look like. Might be similar to papers covering methods of construction, but being a theorist I’ve never looked into these yet, may have to for my project later.