The last week (from Monday to Friday) I attended the intensive week for the course Systems & Control. There have been 3 lectures before and there is going to be one more; but during the week, we were doing nothing else ;-) Indeed, pretty intensive - lectures, a lot of homework, and we started to prepare presentations for the last lecture.
The University of Twente (where we stayed; Twente is a province of the Netherlands) has a very green campus; it's located perhaps just between the cities of Enschede and Hengelo. It's a technical university, one of the smallest universities in the Netherlands (7000 students?).
During one evening, I managed to visit the city of Enschede. I've already seen cities without a historical center. However this city seems not to have any center at all; OK, there is a big square somewhere in the middle, but other than that, the center is just a lot of building on one place. They say, it's because there was 1) a fire 200 years ago; 2) Nazi's bombarding the city during WWII.
We visited a department of Robotics. Wow, they had a human-like robot there (unfortunately, it seems to work just once every two years and we were not lucky this time...). Also there was a legs-robot, trying to imitate the style of walking that is proper to normal humans (and unlike the style of most humanoid robots made these days). Then there was a crawler robot designed to find out leaks in gas piped (from inside, of course). Finally, there was a 3-D copy machine. Cool, you just upload a 3-D image made in CAD and within 10 hours, you have your desired object (made of some kind of hard resin). It was brand new, in the lab they wanted to use it to make the mechanical parts of robots.
We were accomodated in a conference hotel (though this was rather by a mistake...), breakfasts included :-D Also there was an "intensive" 3-meals dinner on Wednesday for us :-D Studying is sweet. All this was paid for us.
OK, now I will have to do the presentation for the last lecture. But I am not alone in that...
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