Professor. Sea Captain. Diver. Engineer. Student.
I'm already a professor, but I'm going back to school. Design and digital manufacturing have come a long way in the last few years, and it's time I got caught up. I'm looking forward to the challenges we're about to face together, and to the network we'll build overcoming them all.
The FabLab Kamp Lintfort is well known to all, I'm sure. It's a happy, busy place, where young people (and some old ones too) get to explore modern design and manufacturing. One of my goals is to integrate it and the complementary ENSPIRE project on our Cleves campus more concretely into the teaching curricula of our engineering degrees.
My plan in 2018 was to build a new robot submersible called Trichitalchen. It was to be a three-fin propelled underwater robot designed to explore weed-choked shallow lakes and canals with a side scan sonar. The concept was inspired from an exam question I set my students a few years ago. Its first real job would have been to map the bicycles and other junk buried in the mud at the bottom of the canal through our campus. One of these days I will build it, but it might not be in 2019.