I saw snow falling for the first time whilst riding my bicycle home yesterday! OK so trust me, those little white dots you see in the light are snowflakes :-)

No, Perth and Sydney haven't frozen over (in fact it looks like they're having a bit of a heatwave over there (even by Australian standards!) ...

Since the end of July I've been on the other side of the world (literally - a back-of-the-envelope calculation tells me that if I drill a hole through the middle of the Earth from here I'll come out about 400km off the coast of Perth), visiting the Field Robotics Center of the Robotics Institute of Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh as a "Visiting Scholar" ...

I'm working partially on things like literature reviews for my Ph.D. and partially on their Trestle project, which aims to develop techniques to co-ordinate a team of robots in order to assemble structures in space. For this, I'm doing some development work on a simulator, based in the Gazebo robot simulation package, and am investigating ways of developing control policies based on observing how humans perform tasks. Exciting stuff! :-)

Now excuse me whilst I order another pair of flannel-lined jeans ... it can get cold riding to and from home in below-zero (that's Celsius) temperatures on a regular basis!