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Innovation in research - A personal short story



"The best of innovations happens when certainty is no longer certain" ~ myself

My undertaking of my Ph.D (part-time I might add) was on the premise that I would acquire enough research funding for not only tuition but especially hardware. I didn't think for one minute that I would struggle to get money from my sponsor DENEL, but after what has been coming on the news regarding the company being cash-less, its quite clear that I would have to re-think my strategy on how what I'm going to execute this research with maximum exposure.

And by exposure I mean the fact that a Ph.D should propel one to a possible career in academia or research institutes, IF done correctly. That's a BIG IF given that aerospace engineering Ph.D in Africa is not well sought after or even recognized by the rest of the aerospace community, let alone in the field of intelligent flight control. 

This is where innovation kicks in. In a big way!!! When you realize it's either you get smart or you quit, does one's brain cells get churning into a frenzy. So a few months ago I started re-furbishing a Denel quadcopter left to collect dusts at work. A few weeks later, I had a pseudo-working autonomous vehicle. Could it be possible that I had just acquired a testbed for my research. It turns out that the answer was... YES! 

Over the next month, I proceeded in trying to not only to test and fly the quadcopter, but collect data while doing aggressive maneuvers for the purpose of nonlinear estimation of the motor parameters. The idea here is to prove that Artificial intelligence can be used to predict the motor parameters such that the autopilot can have better information to stabilize the vehicle. Enough of the Jargon, you might say...

Ok then. The point I'm trying to make here is that in every corner there's innovation dust. So I managed to prove that again knowing that I've got just as good of a reliable  research tesbed as any full-time research labs in the world (MIT, UCL, Caltech) yet at a fraction of the budget. The beauty of being African!
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Comments

  1. Unknown19 December 2017 at 08:57

    Very impressive Paulin. Godspeed on your PhD project. The beauty of being an African child lies in the ability to improvise, most of the time.

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    Replies
    1. pkantue19 December 2017 at 16:34

      Thanks madam. That's so true. As Africans we are so tenacious and ingenious on the things that matter to us. Take care. :)

      Delete
  2. Unknown21 December 2017 at 09:21

    Thanks Paulin for sharing your experience. Your effort tallies with my thoughts recently that the African can excel on "the things that matter to us" when he has his back to the wall sometimes and always most times. Wishing you success which has already begun.

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    Replies
    1. pkantue21 December 2017 at 13:36

      Thanks for the feedback Matthews. I agree totally with you. All the best as well.

      Delete

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