Let's talk robotics with Dr Fatma Al-widyan

Joining me today is Dr Fatma Al-widyan. She is a passionate educator and is currently the director of UTS Student Teams (FSAE Electric Car, FSAE Autonomous Car, The Rover Project, and The Rocketry Project).

Fatma says being an educator is better than any dessert she has ever had. She has always wanted a job that excited her to get up in the morning for. It has been extremely rewarding for Fatma and she feels truly blessed to work with students as it is her passion. She believes a great educator will be of the most influential people in the student’s academic and social development, and she does her best to give them the guidance, encouragement, compassion, and strength to eventually create engineers who bring their knowledge into reality and pass on the love of learning.

As the director of Faculty Teams, she believes it is not as much about the project you involve yourself in as it is about inspiring each other as young engineers to be creative, competent, productive, well-respected, and highly skilled leaders that can work successfully in any discipline. Also, providing the engineering profession with another generation of superstars who drive innovation for our nation.

There is plenty of training and experience around working in a team, leadership, and problem-solving, but also communication, presentation skills, and engagement with industry throughout their education that had powerful effects on our students' learning outcomes.

Her Ph.D. research proposed a novel effort-based theoretical framework for pedestrian route choice problems to discover principles that pedestrians use to select their routes. Pedestrian chooses their route by optimising certain criteria such as distance, time, and effort. Several possible criteria that could be used to predict the route choices of a pedestrian are re-assessed. In most cases, the common criteria of a pedestrian route choice are route length and travel time. The effort is proposed as an additional criterion, which indicates metabolic energy.