We have had other pneumatic and hydraulic designs which took some really novel CFD [computational fluid dynamics] calculations and fabricated solutions which also integrated some interesting mechatronics for robotic needs of a swimming and climbing snake-like robot.

Still to enable things to be portable then you need to embrace power and careful design of power use to enable effective and enduring solutions. To that end we researched all the current approaches, patents and research to fuel cells and came up with a design that can be fuelled for a year, easily refuelled and the fuel delivered in a way that could easily be controlled and managed. Our solution then had to tackle the environmental impact and operating dynamics such that it could work in the harshest and most contaminated of environments to the most arid.

Not content with extremely interesting branches of physics usually embraced by technology, we chose to find a novel solution that was self-powered and used emissivity to great effect. But that wasn't the leading-edge aspect; that was printing this device.

We were asked to design a tracker device that could be no more than 25% bigger than a pet RFID tag which could be put into objects or even subdermally. This is not as easy as it sounds. Launching the RF is a huge problem. Then we hit upon a really novel way of doing this and the design is successful.

Science isn't boring when you can work across chemistry, biology, physics, geology, geography, mathematics, languages, and many more areas through effective solutions which we can and do manufacture mostly in the electronics engineering [computers and microprocessors, advanced signal processing, RF engineering, robotics, cryptography, electro-optics and EW] sphere on land, sea, air and space.