Pat Fothergill (en)
This is a blog post by Myra Wilson, for International Women’s Day 2021. You can find the Welsh version here.
Dyma blog gan Myra Wilson, ar gyfer Diwrnod Rhyngwladol Y Menywod 2021. Cewch ffindio’r fersiwn Cymraeg yma.
Pat Fothergill (née Waddington) (1936 – 2017)
Pat Fothergill started her robotics career in the Department of Machine Intelligence and Perception (later to become the Department of Artificial Intelligence) at Edinburgh University. She worked as an RA, then a lecturer, working closely with Robin Popplestone on programming robot manipulators. Pat led the robotics group until she left to take up a senior lectureship at Aberdeen University in 1986.
Pat’s main early research involved designing and building a manipulator arm called Freddy (currently in the Museum of Scotland) which was capable of assembling objects using vision. Later research developed the RAPT language (Robot Automatically Programmed Tool) which allowed a programmer to describe how they wanted an assembly by robot to be done in an object oriented manner. This included modelling, spacial relationships and an algebra manipulation module. On her move to Aberdeen, she took part of the RAPT project with her and went on to develop Artificial Intelligence teaching in her new department.
I first met Pat in my final year as an undergrad. She had just moved from Edinburgh to Aberdeen to the Computer Science Department where I was an undergrad in my final year.. She taught a module on robotics (my first encounter with the subject) and I ended up doing my final year project under her supervision (a graphical interface to the RAPT programming language). It was a bit of a strange situation which I didn’t really appreciate at the time – one of my friends, another female, also ended up doing a project with Pat, so we’d sit and discuss robotics – 3 women together in the mid 1980’s. It wasn’t till I went to a robotics conference a few years later with 400 men in suits that I realised just how unique that situation was!
Pat was an inspiration and a very down to earth person who was prepared to put in time to help and advise. One of the early robot pioneers in Scotland, she passed her knowledge on to many undergrads and postgrads alike.
