Autonomous flying robots

In the talk below from TED 2012 Vijay Kumar describes the development of amazing autonomous flying robots that can operate individually or as a team.

Clip courtesy of TED.com.

Patrick's Day Holiday

DIT Library Bolton Street will close on St. Patrick's Day, Saturday 17th March 2012 and on Bank Holiday Monday 19th March 2012.

The library will open as normal at 9:30am on Tuesday 20th March 2012.

Image courtesy of crazy-frankenstein.com.

IEEE Explore - Training Sessions

IEEE is the Institution of Electrical and Electronics Engineers. DIT Library has a subscription with their database IEEE Explore. The database boasts over 30% of world literature in the areas of electrical engineering, electronics and computer science. It also contains a lot of information in the areas of aerospace, computer hardware and software as well as power and energy.

IEEE will run two one hour training sessions for this database on Thursday 22nd March at the library in Aungier Street. There will be one session at 10am and one at 1pm.

If you wish to attend either session please contact your local DIT library.

SEAI Energy Show 2012 at the RDS

The Energy Show 2012, organised by the Sustainable Energy Authority of Ireland (SEAI), will take place at the RDS in Dublin on the 28th and 29th March.
There will be a variety of smart energy solutions on show as well as an impressive timetable of seminars.
See more at the website.

Harvesting energy from aircraft landing gear

Researchers at Lincoln University have investigated the feasibility of recovering energy from the wheel rotation of aircraft landing gear.

Energy which presently is expended through friction in the disc brakes could be harvested and used to power taxiing to and from airport buildings.

This could result in "engine-less taxiing" which is an objective of ACARE (Advisory Council for Aeronautics Research in Europe).

You can read more about this at theengineer.co.uk.

Story courtesy of theengineer.co.uk.

Image courtesy of Google Images.

Go Asian young man

Guess who's coming to dinner on 18th feb? Xi Jinping no less. Xi Jinping for those who do not know is considered as the man most likely to be the next leader of China. China is also currently the 2nd most important economy in the world. By the time Xi Jinping is thru it could be No.1. He is also by trade a Chemical Engineer. AND the point of all this?

• firstly see blog post from 3rd May 2011



• 2nd it's telling that from last week The Economist has started to include a new dedicated weekly section on China.



• and 3rdly China, and Asia generally, unlike US and USA are going places and are investingly heavily in infrastructure.

For this they need, they are crying out for... engineers. Whatever about architecture, there is no better time to be studying engineering at DIT. So hang in there, brush up on your Mardarin, (thats what Mark Zuckerberg is doing - though that might be just to talk to his girlfriend), the world is your oyster

Will it be possible to charge electric cars on the move?

One of the main issues with electric cars is how often they need charging and what mileage can be got from a charge.

WiTricity is a spin out company from Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). They are developing systems that will deliver kilowatts of power over several metres.

In theory a series of units like this could be positioned at the side of a motorway and could charge cars on the move.

Stanford University are running a computer model feasibility study of the system.

You can read more on this story at theengineer.co.uk.

Story courtesy of theengineer.co.uk.

Image courtesy of electriccarsite.co.uk.