User:Simonrafferty22

I am a professional Engineer living and working in West Sussex, UK. I run a small Engineering company X-Eng which designs after market parts for Land Rover vehicles and sells via our website as well as through numerous distributors.

While X-Eng is centred on Mechanical Engineering, I was originally an Electrical Engineer and have a degree in 'Microelectronics & Microprocessor Applications' - a bit of a mouthful! However, Electrical & Mechanical Engineering are more similar than they are different - so it was not such a big change.

Personally, I've had a long standing interest in Robotics & in particular, Cybernetics. In fact, Cybernetics was my original career choice however my school advised me to study Engineering rather than Medicine - which turned out to be incorrect, at least at that time, if you wanted a job in Cybernetics!.

I've built a number of multi-legged walking machines with up to 20 control axis. In the past, because computing power was at a premium I developed a secondary interest in evolutionary algorithms (GA's) to evolve more efficient control solutions to allow a low performance processor to dynamically control such a vehicle.

Following this theme, last year my Wife Sarah asked me to build a Coffee table - so I built a six legged walking coffee table! It's very simple with just a mechanical linkage to control the locus of the legs and uses tank-steer - but it does stomp around the living room, frightening children and spilling coffee! There is some video of it here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h4T4tN-nwLY

Two friends (Guy Radford & Chris Watts) competed in the BBC TV series 'Robot Wars' from 2001 to 2003. Although we were not wildly successful, our robot 'Barber-ous' did make it on to TV a number of times. The series and in particular, the other competitors were great fun. It was this more than anything that precipitated my move from Electrical to Mechanical engineering.