Need to model the rotations of a rigid body in six-degrees-of-freedom? Use quaternions.They are *very* cool. I have written a small Matlab/Octave library of functions, for modelling rotations with quaternions. It includes an animated demonstration script which lets you visualize the rotations (see the .gif above). This is really useful for sanity checking your code and helping you to understand what's going on. Download the 'manageQuaternions' library here: manageQuaternions.zip…
Download my 2013 UTSG paper here: 30 cars, figure of 8, 1 show: large scale proving ground experiments to investigate junction control. Simon Box, John Lees-Miller, James Snowdon, James Hammond, Andy Hamilton, Shashank Gupta, R. Eddie Wilson, Ben Waterson…
This is a trailer for a small article that will be appearing on the BBC's The One Show on the 24th August 2012. I was involved in the making of this back in May and it was a lot of fun, so I hope the finished article will be informative and fun too. I am not allowed to give away specific details on the content of the article before the programme is broadcast, but I can say it is about machine learning in traffic control and it involves a traffic control experiment on a grand scale.…
James Snowdon's new website contains some really interesting stuff on traffic control and complexity science in general. Plus it links over to this website so in the spirit of mutual backslapping: http://snowdonjames.com/…
A team from Bolton Science and Technology Centre (Cambridge rocketry toolbox users) made an attempt on the U.K. altitude record this month with Black Streak. See the BBC news article: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-manchester-14760906.…
This month I helped to run a Transportation Research Group exhibit at the Royal Society Summer Science Exhibition. The exhibit was called 21st Centrury Traffic Control: The Invisible Referee. You can visit the exhibit micro site here. The exhibit featured three interactive displays. Two of these were touch screen computer games, one on traffic light junction control and one on "phantom waves". The third activity was a Scalextric set with traffic control. The exhibit also featured some…