Question: Do ye ever put off starting a new project ?

Conor McGinn answered on 11 Mar 2016:

Hey Holly,

Sometimes… Obviously its not ideal but it happens. Some reasons why:
* We lose someone – this is a killer. I do not do all this work myself – far from it actually. I work with an incredible team of gifted and talent students and engineers. When we lose one (they graduate, we cant find funding to keep them on etc.), it often means that we need to delay work. Robotics is a really new area so there are not very few people out there, even among engineers, that have the skills and ability to step in.
* We get something wrong. What I do has large degrees of uncertainty attached to it – thats what makes it worth doing. It’s my job to investigate ideas. If an idea doesnt work out they way we hope it will, or we learn something new that changes how we feel about either the problem or the solution we are investigating, then we need to address this. This can delay a project – before we start something – especially something that will cost alot of money and take time – we need to be pretty sure that we have done all we can to ensure its feasible.
* politics and bureaucracy can also affect things. I spend a lot of time writing – writing journal papers, technical reports, research proposals etc. These things takealot of time however they are needed to justify the validity of my work. I need to account for the resources im using and be able to demonstrate that my efforts have a worthwhile output – that my work is helping us learn new things. If I dont do this, then nobody will ever fund my work. This is really annoying because designing things and building robots is where my biggest strength lies, yet I often find myself being forced to spend hours upon hours writing essays.