Museum robots: multi-robot systems for public exhibition

Mobile robots provide a versatile platform for research, however they can also provide an interesting educational platform for public exhibition at museums. In general museums require exhibits that are both eye catching and exciting to the public whilst requiring a minimum of maintenance time from museum technicians. In many cases it is simply not possible to continuously change batteries and some method of supplying continous power is required. A powered flooring system is described that is capable of providing power continuously to a group of robots. Three different museum exhibit applications are described. All three robot exhibits are of a similar basic design although the exhibits are very different in appearance and behaviour. The durability and versatility of the robots also makes them extremely good candidates for long duration experiments such as those required by evolutionary robotics.

Mirror lightpipes: daylighting performance in real buildings

Mirror lightpipes are useful for providing healthy and energy-efficient daylight into buildings where windows and skylights are unsuitable, insufficient or generate too much heat gain. The lightpipes have been installed in dozens of buildings in the UK. Field monitoring has been carried out to assess their performance in four different buildings: the headquaters of a major insurance company, a health clinic, a residential building and a college dining hall In those cases where lighipipes with moderate aspect ratios were installed, good illuminance of up to 450 lux has been obtained with internal/external illuminance ratios around 1%. When long and narrow lightpipes with many bends are used, however, the ratio reduced to around 0.1%. These results showed that lightpipes can be effective daylighting devices provided that excessive aspect ratios and numbers of bends are avoided. Lightpipes with larger diameters should be used whenever possible. The lightpipes often improved signiScantly the visual quality af the interior environment, and high user satisfaction was found even in buildings where a relatively low level of daylight was admitted through the lightpipes

Pil and Galia Kollectiv: solo exhibition at Te Tuhi Art Centre, Auckland, New Zealand.

The exhibition presents the full Future Trilogy which was completed in 2009. The trilogy is based on the opening of a new IKEA store in Edmonton, London in November 2005. IKEA celebrated with a twenty-four hour launch accompanied by significant price reductions on leather sofas. But when six thousand people arrived to compete for the discount a riot ensued which injured sixteen shoppers and required the store to be closed after just thirty minutes. The Future Trilogy takes this event as the starting point to speculate on a future where the popular fascination with modern designer furniture has morphed into state religions underpinned by the ideals of the early twentieth century avant-garde. The exhibition also presents their 2010 work Co-Operative Explanatory Capabilities in Organizational Design and Personnel Management which narrates a fictional story of a company that adopts highly experimental approaches to achieving worker productivity. The project investigates the place of creativity in efficiency management and the operation of bureaucratic systems in a post-industrial work environment. The Kollectiv's pseudo documentary creates a careful blend of fact and fiction through the combination of a distinctive BBC narrator's voice with imagery sourced from an online photographic archive for an early computing company. The story becomes increasingly provocative as more and more of the bizarre antics of the company employees are revealed, leading to the members of the company eventually forming a religious cult.

Case study on the whole life carbon cycle in buildings

Global temperatures are expected to rise by between 1.1 and 6.4oC this century, depending, to a large extent, on the amount of carbon we emit to the atmosphere from now onwards. This warming is expected to have very negative effects on many peoples and ecosystems and, therefore, minimising our carbon emissions is a priority. Buildings are estimated to be responsible for around 50% of carbon emissions in the UK. Potential reductions involve both operational emissions, produced during use, and embodied emissions, produced during manufacture of materials and components, and during construction, refurbishments and demolition. To date the major effort has focused on reducing the, apparently, larger operational element, which is more readily quantifiable and reduction measures are relatively straightforward to identify and implement. Various studies have compared the magnitude of embodied and operational emissions, but have shown considerable variation in the relative values. This illustrates the difficulties in quantifying embodied, as it requires a detailed knowledge of the processes involved in the different life cycle phases, and requires the use of consistent system boundaries. However, other studies have established the interaction between operational and embodied, which demonstrates the importance of considering both elements together in order to maximise potential reductions. This is borne out in statements from both the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and The Low Carbon Construction Innovation and Growth Team of the UK Government. In terms of meeting the 2020 and 2050 timeframes for carbon reductions it appears to be equally, if not more, important to consider early embodied carbon reductions, rather than just future operational reductions. Future decarbonisation of energy supply and more efficient lighting and M&E equipment installed in future refits is likely to significantly reduce operational emissions, lending further weight to this argument. A method of discounting to evaluate the present value of future carbon emissions would allow more realistic comparisons to be made on the relative importance of the embodied and operational elements. This paper describes the results of case studies on carbon emissions over the whole lifecycle of three buildings in the UK, compares four available software packages for determining embodied carbon and suggests a method of carbon discounting to obtain present values for future emissions. These form the initial stages of a research project aimed at producing information on embodied carbon for different types of building, components and forms of construction, in a simplified form, which can be readily used by building designers in optimising building design in terms of minimising overall carbon emissions. Keywords: Embodied carbon; carbon emission; building; operational carbon.