When: Friday, December 6, 2024, 5:30 PM - 9:00 PMWhere: Graduate Center 327 Mile End Road, London E1 4NS, Mile End Campus
Speaker: Aude Billard; Prof. Kaspar Althoefer; Yiannis Demiris
Join us on Friday 6th December to celebrate the past 60 years with an event, featuring special guest speakers and a drinks reception.
In 1964, Prof Meredith Thring became the head of the Department of Mechanical Engineering at Queen Mary, and one of the first professors of Robotics at a UK university, having begun initial work on firefighting robots at the University of Sheffield.
That same year, he developed his iconic Walking Wheel Stair Climbers. Over the next 17 years at Queen Mary, Prof Thring worked on biomedical aids for children affected by the thalidomide crisis, founded an Inventive Design course and published books advocating for sustainable energy approaches.
Fast-forward to 2016 and Prof Kaspar Althoefer becomes Professor of Robotics Engineering at Queen Mary. Under his leadership, the department is awarded £1m to establish a robotics centre for tackling nuclear waste. Today, the Centre for Advanced Robotics @ Queen Mary (ARQ) is home to around 70 academics and researchers, who are working on surgical robots to treat cancer, drones that can deliver supplies to disaster zones and robots that can automate laborious grape-picking work, among many other projects.
We also have two thriving robotics engineering courses, where we are developing the next generation of roboticists.