Moodle@Warwick

The main aim of the module is to provide an understanding of the fundamental principles of mobile robotics and related concepts. The module introduces various mechanisms of mobility for different kinds of mobile robots, algorithms and data structures for safe navigation of the robot, and some techniques for equipping the robot with an intelligent vision system.

The module is primarily addressed at Computer Scientists and Computer Systems Engineers, but it is also taken by Electrical Engineers, Physicists and Mathematicians, so the learning outcomes may vary. After successful completion of this module, students should be able to demonstrate an understanding of the underlying principles of mobile robotics, a knowledge of its applications, and apply these to analyse and solve related real-world problems.

Module leader: Prof. Victoria Rimell 2025-6

Lectures: Mondays 10-12 S0.20 [Social Sciences Block]

Latin text classes: Tuesdays 12-1, FAB 2.01

This module will investigate what being vulnerable, weak, impotent, invalid or dependent meant in the Roman world. To what extent did vulnerability give rise to moral and ethical obligations, in a context in which invulnerability defined the dignified citizen male against a series of soft, wounded, twisted, disabled and penetrable bodies? Were those who embodied vulnerability ever heard, or only written over/on? In what ways was Roman literature ‘fleshy’? To what extent do Latin literary texts reproduce the body as a product of institutionalized knowledge and control? As we work our way through a wide range of texts from the Republican period to the late first century CE, from satire, fable, erotic elegy and iambic to imperial epic and the philosophical letter, we will explore how bodily (in)vulnerability becomes the currency in which much of what we know as ‘Latin literature’ trades – as a means of probing boundaries between the human and non-human, between the masculine and feminine, or between the free and the enslaved; as a metaphorical system for describing rhetorical performance or invoking the materiality of texts; as a cast for poses of inferiority, including Latin literature’s ‘inferiority complex’ in relation to Greek predecessors; or as provocative imagery in Roman representations of erotic and imperial desire. The module will also debate how Roman thinking about vulnerability (particularly in terms of gender and ageing) may be similar to and different from our own.