The story so far:
I am currently studying engineering at Alevel (edexell advanced engineering diploma) im coming to the end of the first year on this course which, so far has been great. next year I have to complete an "extended project". we will spend 5 hours a week for the entire year doing this, it will be largely funded buy my schooland I will also have complete acsess to Sheffield hallam university's workshop and expertise.
Basicly we have to create a product that is in some way inovative or an improvement on a similar product, this product can be whatever we want to make, so i couldent posibly pass up this chance to make a completely kick ass robot!
Being able to use the universities facilities gives me huge scope, a custom chassis using a 5 axis CNC milling machine is a possibility *rubs hands*. the university its self has a well known robotics and engineering sector that recently won a grant for £180,000 to fund microbot reasearch.
http://www.engineeringtalk.com/news/sef/sef101.html
so my challange is to come up with an inovation to incoperate in to the bot. ive thought about uses for the military or fire service. another posibility is to build several robots with swarming capabilities, the inovation dosent have to be hardware based it could be programing techniques. it could even be to create an easy to use consumer bot to get people into the wunderfull world of robotics. anyway any ideas or sugestions drop a line ;)