Industrial robot
An industrial robot is a robot system used for manufacturing. Industrial robots are automated and capable of movement on three or more axis. Typical applications of robots include welding, assembly and place for printed circuit boards and labeling, product inspection, testing, they can assist in material handling. In the year 2015, an estimated 1.64 million industrial robots were in operation worldwide according to International Federation of Robotics. The most used robot configurations are articulated robots, SCARA robots, delta robots and cartesian coordinate robots. In the context of general robotics, most types of robots would fall into the category of robotic arms. Robots exhibit varying degrees of autonomy: Some robots are programmed to faithfully carry out specific actions over and over again without variation and with a high degree of accuracy; these actions are determined by programmed routines that specify the direction, velocity and distance of a series of coordinated motions. Other robots are much more flexible as to the orientation of the object on which they are operating or the task that has to be performed on the object itself, which the robot may need to identify.
For example, for more precise guidance, robots contain machine vision sub-systems acting as their visual sensors, linked to powerful computers or controllers. Artificial intelligence, or what passes for it, is becoming an important factor in the modern industrial robot; the earliest known industrial robot, conforming to the ISO definition was completed by "Bill" Griffith P. Taylor in 1937 and published in Meccano Magazine, March 1938; the crane-like device was built entirely using Meccano parts, powered by a single electric motor. Five axes of movement were possible, including grab rotation. Automation was achieved using punched paper tape to energise solenoids, which would facilitate the movement of the crane's control levers; the robot could stack wooden blocks in pre-programmed patterns. The number of motor revolutions required for each desired movement was first plotted on graph paper; this information was transferred to the paper tape, driven by the robot's single motor. Chris Shute built a complete replica of the robot in 1997.
George Devol applied for the first robotics patents in 1954. The first company to produce a robot was Unimation, founded by Devol and Joseph F. Engelberger in 1956. Unimation robots were called programmable transfer machines since their main use at first was to transfer objects from one point to another, less than a dozen feet or so apart, they used hydraulic actuators and were programmed in joint coordinates, i.e. the angles of the various joints were stored during a teaching phase and replayed in operation. They were accurate to within 1/10,000 of an inch. Unimation licensed their technology to Kawasaki Heavy Industries and GKN, manufacturing Unimates in Japan and England respectively. For some time Unimation's only competitor was Cincinnati Milacron Inc. of Ohio. This changed radically in the late 1970s when several big Japanese conglomerates began producing similar industrial robots. In 1969 Victor Scheinman at Stanford University invented the Stanford arm, an all-electric, 6-axis articulated robot designed to permit an arm solution.
This allowed it to follow arbitrary paths in space and widened the potential use of the robot to more sophisticated applications such as assembly and welding. Scheinman designed a second arm for the MIT AI Lab, called the "MIT arm." Scheinman, after receiving a fellowship from Unimation to develop his designs, sold those designs to Unimation who further developed them with support from General Motors and marketed it as the Programmable Universal Machine for Assembly. Industrial robotics took off quite in Europe, with both ABB Robotics and KUKA Robotics bringing robots to the market in 1973. ABB Robotics introduced IRB 6, among the world's first commercially available all electric micro-processor controlled robot; the first two IRB 6 robots were sold to Magnusson in Sweden for grinding and polishing pipe bends and were installed in production in January 1974. In 1973 KUKA Robotics built its first robot, known as FAMULUS one of the first articulated robots to have six electromechanically driven axes.
Interest in robotics increased in the late 1970s and many US companies entered the field, including large firms like General Electric, General Motors. U. S. startup companies included Adept Technology, Inc.. At the height of the robot boom in 1984, Unimation was acquired by Westinghouse Electric Corporation for 107 million U. S. dollars. Westinghouse sold Unimation to Stäubli Faverges SCA of France in 1988, still making articulated robots for general industrial and cleanroom applications and bought the robotic division of Bosch in late 2004. Only a few non-Japanese companies managed to survive in this market, the major ones being: Adept Technology, Stäubli, the Swedish-Swiss company ABB Asea Brown Boveri, the German company KUKA Robotics and the Italian company Comau. Number of axes – two axes are required to reach any point in a plane. To control the orientation of the end of the arm three more axes (yaw, pit
Danbury, Connecticut
Danbury is a city in Fairfield County, United States, located 50 miles northeast of New York City making it part of the New York metropolitan area. Danbury's population at the 2010 census was 80,893. Danbury is the fourth most populous city in Fairfield County, seventh among Connecticut cities; the city is within the New York combined statistical Bridgeport metropolitan area. The city is named for Danbury in England, it is nicknamed the "Hat City" because for a period in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries it was the center of the American hat industry. The mineral danburite is named for Danbury. Danbury is home to Danbury Hospital, Western Connecticut State University, Danbury Fair Mall and Danbury Municipal Airport. In November 2015, USA Today ranked Danbury as the second best city to live in the United States. Danbury was settled by colonists in 1685, when eight families moved from what are now Norwalk and Stamford, Connecticut; the Danbury area was called Pahquioque by its namesake, the Algonquian-speaking Pahquioque Native Americans, who occupied lands along the Still River.
Bands were identified by such geographic designation but they were associated with the larger nation by culture and language). One of the original English settlers was Samuel Benedict, who bought land from the Paquioque in 1685, along with his brother James Benedict, James Beebe, Judah Gregory; this area was called Paquiack by the Paquioque. In recognition of the wetlands, the settlers chose the name Swampfield for their town. In October 1687, the general court decreed the name Danbury; the general court appointed a committee to lay out the new town's boundaries. A survey was made in 1693, a formal town patent was granted in 1702. During the American Revolution, Danbury was an important military supply depot for the Continental Army. Sybil Ludington, 16-year-old daughter of American Colonel Henry Ludington, made a 40-mile ride in the early hours of the night on April 26, 1777, to warn the people of Danbury and her father's forces in Putnam County, New York, of the approach of British regulars, helping them gather in defense.
During the following day on April 26, 1777, the British, under Major General William Tryon and looted Danbury, but fatalities were limited due to Ludington's warning. The central motto on the seal of the City of Danbury is Restituimus, a reference to the destruction caused by the Loyalist army troops; the American General David Wooster was mortally wounded at the Battle of Ridgefield by the British forces which had attacked Danbury, but at the beginning of the battle, the Americans succeeded in driving the British forces down to Long Island Sound. Wooster is buried in Danbury's Wooster Cemetery. In 1802, President Thomas Jefferson wrote a letter to the Danbury Baptist Association, a group expressing fear of persecution by the Congregationalists of that town, in which he used the expression "Separation of Church and State", it is the first known instance of the expression in American political writing. The letter is on display at the Unitarian-Universalist Congregation of Danbury; the first Danbury Fair was held in 1821.
In 1869, it became a yearly event. The fairgrounds were cleared to make room for the Danbury Fair Mall, which opened in autumn 1986. In 1835, the Connecticut Legislature granted a rail charter to the Fairfield County Railroad, but construction was delayed because of lack of investment. In 1850, the organization's plans were scaled back, renamed the Danbury and Norwalk Railroad. Work moved on the 23 mi railroad line. In 1852, the first railroad line in Danbury opened, with two trains making the 75-minute trip to Norwalk; the central part of Danbury was incorporated as a borough in 1822. The borough was reincorporated as the city of Danbury on April 19, 1889; the city and town were consolidated on January 1, 1965. The first dam to be built on the river, to collect water for the hat industry, impounded the Kohanza Reservoir; this dam broke on January 1869, under pressure of ice and water. The ensuing flood of icy water killed 11 people within 30 minutes, caused major damage to homes and farms; as a busy city, Danbury attracted traveling shows and tours, including Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show in 1900.
It featured young men of the Oglala Sioux nation. Oglala Sioux Albbert Afraid of Hawk died on June 1900, at age 21 in Danbury during the tour, he was buried at Wooster Cemetery. In 2012, employee Robert Young discovered Afraid of Hawk's remains; the city consulted with Oglala Sioux leaders of the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation and arranged repatriation of the remains to the nation. Wrapped in a bison skin, the remains were transported to Manderson, South Dakota, to Saint Mark's Episcopal Cemetery, for reburial by tribal descendants. In 1928 local plane pilots bought a 60-acre tract near the Fairgrounds, known as Tucker's Field, leased it to the town; this was developed as an airport, now Danbury Municipal Airport. Connecticut's largest lake, Candlewood Lake, was created as a hydroelectric power facility in 1928 by building a dam where Wood Creek and the Rocky River meet near the Housatonic River in New Milford. During World War II, Danbury's federal prison was one of many sites used for the incarceration of conscientious objectors.
One in six inmates in the United States' federal prisons was a conscientious objector, prisons like Danbury found themselves filled with large numbers of highly
Westinghouse Electric Corporation
The Westinghouse Electric Corporation was an American manufacturing company. It was founded on January 8, 1886, as Westinghouse Electric Company and renamed Westinghouse Electric Corporation by its founder George Westinghouse. George Westinghouse had founded the Westinghouse Air Brake Company; the corporation purchased the CBS broadcasting company in 1995 and became the original CBS Corporation in 1997. Westinghouse Electric was founded by George Westinghouse in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania in 1886; the firm became active in developing electric infrastructure throughout the United States. The company's largest factories were located in East Pittsburgh Pennsylvania, Lester, Pennsylvania and in Hamilton, where they made turbines, generators and switch gear for generation and use of electricity. In addition to George Westinghouse, early engineers working for the company included Frank Conrad, Benjamin Garver Lamme, Oliver B. Shallenberger, William Stanley, Nikola Tesla, Stephen Timoshenko and Vladimir Zworykin.
Early on, Westinghouse was a rival to Thomas Edison's electric company. In 1892, Edison was merged with Westinghouse's chief AC rival, the Thomson-Houston Electric Company, making an bigger competitor, General Electric. Westinghouse Electric & Manufacturing Company changed its name to Westinghouse Electric Corporation in 1945. Westinghouse purchased CBS Inc. in 1995. Westinghouse Electric Corporation changed its name to and became CBS Corporation in 1997. In 1998, the Power Generation Business Unit, headquartered in Orlando, was sold to Siemens AG, of Germany. A year CBS sold all of its commercial nuclear power businesses to British Nuclear Fuels Limited. In connection with that sale, certain rights to use the Westinghouse trademarks were granted to the newly formed BNFL subsidiary, Westinghouse Electric Company; that company was sold to Toshiba in 2006. In 1990, Westinghouse experienced a financial catastrophe when the Corporation lost over one billion dollars due to bad high-risk, high-fee, high-interest loans made by its Westinghouse Credit Corporation lending arm.
In an attempt to revitalize the corporation, the Board of Directors appointed outside management in the form of CEO Michael Jordan, who brought in numerous consultants to help re-engineer the company in order to realize the potential that they saw in the broadcasting industry. Westinghouse reduced the work force in many of its traditional industrial operations and made further acquisitions in broadcasting to add to its substantial Group W network, purchasing CBS in 1995. Shortly after, Westinghouse purchased Infinity Broadcasting, TNN, CMT, American Radio Systems, rights to NFL broadcasting; these investments cost the company over fifteen billion dollars. To recoup its costs, Westinghouse sold many other operations. Siemens purchased non-nuclear power generation, while other firms bought the defense electronics, office furniture company Knoll, Thermo King, residential security. With little remaining of the company aside from its broadcasting, Westinghouse renamed itself CBS Corporation in 1997.
During the 20th century, Westinghouse engineers and scientists were granted more than 28,000 US government patents, the third most of any company. The company pioneered the power generation industry and in the fields of long-distance power transmission and high-voltage alternating-current transmission, unveiling the technology for lighting in Great Barrington, Massachusetts; the first commercial Westinghouse steam turbine driven generator, a 1,500 kW unit, began operation at Hartford Electric Light Co. in 1901. The machine, nicknamed Mary-Ann, was the first steam turbine generator to be installed by an electric utility to generate electricity in the US. George Westinghouse had based his original steam turbine design on designs licensed from the English inventor Charles Parsons. Today a large proportion of steam turbine generators operating around the world, ranging to units as large as 1,500 MW were supplied by Westinghouse from its factories in Lester, Pennsylvania. Major Westinghouse licensees or joint venture partners included Mitsubishi Heavy Industries of Japan and Harbin Turbine Co. and Shanghai Electric Co. of China.
Westinghouse boasted 50,000 employees by 1900, established a formal research and development department in 1906. While the company was expanding, it would experience internal financial difficulties. During the Panic of 1907, the Board of Directors forced George Westinghouse to take a six-month leave of absence. Westinghouse retired in 1909 and died several years in 1914. Under new leadership, Westinghouse Electric diversified its business activities in electrical technology, it acquired the Copeman Electric Stove Company in 1914 and Pittsburgh High Voltage Insulator Company in 1921. Westinghouse moved into radio broadcasting by establishing Pittsburgh's KDKA, the first commercial radio station, WBZ in Springfield, Massachusetts in 1921. Westinghouse expanded into the elevator business, establishing the Westinghouse Elevator Company in 1928. Throughout the decade, diversification engendered considerable growth. Westinghouse produced the first operational American turbojet for the US Navy program in 1943.
After many successes, the ill-fated J40 project, started soon after WWII, was abandoned in 1955 and led to Westinghouse exiting the aircraft engine business with closure of the Westinghouse Aviation Gas Turbine Division in 1960. During the late 1940s Westinghouse applied its aviation gas turbine technology and experience to develop its first industrial gas turbine. A 2,0
Victor Scheinman
Victor David Scheinman was an American pioneer in the field of robotics. He was born in Augusta, where his father Leonard was stationed with the US Army. At the end of the war the family moved to Brooklyn and his father returned to work as a professor of psychiatry, his mother taught at a Hebrew school. As a child and teenager Scheinman constructed a voice-controlled typewriter, he was a graduate of the now-defunct New Lincoln High School in New York. In the late 1950s, while in high school, Scheinman engineered a speech-to-text machine as a science fair project. In 1969, while at Stanford University, Scheinman invented the Stanford arm, an all-electric, 6-axis articulated robot designed to permit an arm solution in closed form; this allowed the robot to follow arbitrary paths in space under computer control and widened the potential use of the robot to more sophisticated applications such as assembly and arc welding. In 1973, Scheinman started Vicarm Inc. to manufacture his robot arms. In 1977, Scheinman sold his design to Unimation, who further developed it, with support from General Motors, as the Programmable Universal Machine for Assembly.
He served as General Manager of Unimation's West Coast division before joining Automatix as a co-founder and vice-president in 1980. While at Automatix, Scheinman developed RobotWorld, a system of cooperating small modules suspended from a 2-D linear motor; the product line was sold to Yaskawa. His niece is jazz violinist Jenny Scheinman, he was married to Sandra Auerback in August 2006. His engineer son Dave Scheinman is head of hardware for 3D printing company Carbon-3D Victor Scheinman died on September 20, 2016, in Petrolia, California at the age of 73. Up to the time of his death, Scheinman continued to consult and was a visiting professor at Stanford University in the Department of Mechanical Engineering. Scheinman received the Robotic Industries Association's Joseph F. Engelberger Robotics Award in 1986 and the ASME Leonardo Da Vinci Award of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers in 1990. On April 19, 2002, General Motors' Controls and Welding organization donated the original prototype Programmable Universal Machine for Assembly robot to the Smithsonian.
On June 22, 2006, broadcast of the American game-show Jeopardy!, Scheinman was the subject of the $1600 "answer" for the category "Robotics": "In the 1970s Victor Scheinman developed the PUMA, or programmable universal manipulation THIS". Vicarm
Legged robot
Legged robots are a type of mobile robot which use mechanical limbs for movement. They are more versatile than wheeled robots and can traverse many different terrains, though these advantages require increased complexity and power consumption. Legged robots imitate legged animals, such as humans or insects, in an example of biomimicry. Legged robots can be categorized by the number of limbs which determines gaits available. Many-legged robots tend to be more stable. One-legged, or pogo stick robots use a hopping motion for navigation. In the 1980s, Carnegie Mellon University developed a one-legged robot to study balance. Berkeley's SALTO is another example. Bipedal or two-legged robots exhibit bipedal motion; as such, they face two primary problems: stability control, which refers to a robot's balance, motion control, which refers to a robot's ability to move. Stability control is difficult for bipedal systems, which must maintain balance in the forward-backward direction at rest; some robots toys, solve this problem with large feet, which provide greater stability while reducing mobility.
Alternatively, more advanced systems use sensors such as accelerometers or gyroscopes to provide dynamic feedback in a fashion that approximates a human being's balance. Such sensors are employed for motion control and walking; the complexity of these tasks lends itself to machine learning. Simple bipedal motion can be approximated by a rolling polygon where the length of each side matches that of a single step; as the step length grows shorter, the number of sides increases and the motion approaches that of a circle. This connects bipedal motion to wheeled motion as a limit of stride length. Two-legged robots include: Boston Dynamics' Atlas Toy robots such as QRIO and ASIMO. NASA's Valkyrie robot, intended to aid humans on Mars; the ping-pong playing TOPIO robot. Quadrupedal or four-legged robots exhibit quadrupedal motion, they benefit from increased stability over bipedal robots during movement. At slow speeds, a quadrupedal robot may move only one leg at a time. Four-legged robots benefit from a lower center of gravity than two-legged systems.
Four legged robots include: The TITAN series, developed since the 1980s by the Hirose-Yoneda Laboratory. The dynamically stable BigDog, developed in 2005 by Boston Dynamics, NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, the Harvard University Concord Field Station. BigDog's successor, the LS3. Six-legged robots, or hexapods, are motivated by a desire for greater stability than bipedal or quadrupedal robots, their final designs mimic the mechanics of insects, their gaits may be categorized similarly. These include: Wave gait: the slowest gait, in which pairs of legs move in a "wave" from the back to the front. Tripod gait: a faster step, in which three legs move at once; the remaining three legs provide a stable tripod for the robot. Six-legged robots include: a 375-pound hexapod developed by Odetics in the 1980s. Odex distinguished itself with its onboard computers. Genghis, one of the earliest autonomous six-legged robots, was developed at MIT by Rodney Brooks in the 1980s; the modern toy series, Hexbug. Eight-legged legged robots are inspired by spiders and other arachnids, as well as some underwater walkers.
They offer by far the greatest stability. Eight-legged robots include: Dante, a Carnegie Mellon University project designed to explore Mount Erebus; the T8X, a commercially available robot designed to emulate a spider's appearance and movements. Some robots use a combination of wheels; this grants a machine the speed and energy efficiency of wheeled locomotion as well as the mobility of legged navigation. Boston Dynamics' Handle, a bipedal robot with wheels on both legs, is one example. Leg mechanism Boston Dynamics Humanoid robot Klann linkage Jansen's linkage Robot locomotion Walker Mecha Whegs Bekey, George A.. Autonomous robots: from biological inspiration to implementation and control. Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press. ISBN 978-0-262-02578-2. Wang, Lingfeng.. Evolutionary robotics: from algorithms to implementations. Hackensack, N. J.: World Scientific Pub. ISBN 978-981-256-870-0
Robotics
Robotics is an interdisciplinary branch of engineering and science that includes mechanical engineering, electronic engineering, information engineering, computer science, others. Robotics deals with the design, construction and use of robots, as well as computer systems for their control, sensory feedback, information processing; these technologies are used to develop machines that can substitute for humans and replicate human actions. Robots can be used in many situations and for lots of purposes, but today many are used in dangerous environments, manufacturing processes, or where humans cannot survive. Robots can take on any form but some are made to resemble humans in appearance; this is said to help in the acceptance of a robot in certain replicative behaviors performed by people. Such robots attempt to replicate walking, speech and anything a human can do. Many of today's robots are inspired by nature; the concept of creating machines that can operate autonomously dates back to classical times, but research into the functionality and potential uses of robots did not grow until the 20th century.
Throughout history, it has been assumed by various scholars, inventors and technicians that robots will one day be able to mimic human behavior and manage tasks in a human-like fashion. Today, robotics is a growing field, as technological advances continue. Many robots are built to do jobs that are hazardous to people such as defusing bombs, finding survivors in unstable ruins, exploring mines and shipwrecks. Robotics is used in STEM as a teaching aid; the advent of nanorobots, microscopic robots that can be injected into the human body, could revolutionize medicine and human health. Robotics is a branch of engineering that involves the conception, design and operation of robots; this field overlaps with electronics, computer science, artificial intelligence, mechatronics and bioengineering. The word robotics was derived from the word robot, introduced to the public by Czech writer Karel Čapek in his play R. U. R., published in 1920. The word robot comes from the Slavic word robota; the play begins in a factory that makes artificial people called robots, creatures who can be mistaken for humans – similar to the modern ideas of androids.
Karel Čapek himself did not coin the word. He wrote a short letter in reference to an etymology in the Oxford English Dictionary in which he named his brother Josef Čapek as its actual originator. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the word robotics was first used in print by Isaac Asimov, in his science fiction short story "Liar!", published in May 1941 in Astounding Science Fiction. Asimov was unaware. In some of Asimov's other works, he states that the first use of the word robotics was in his short story Runaround, where he introduced his concept of The Three Laws of Robotics. However, the original publication of "Liar!" Predates that of "Runaround" by ten months, so the former is cited as the word's origin. In 1948, Norbert Wiener formulated the principles of the basis of practical robotics. Autonomous only appeared in the second half of the 20th century; the first digitally operated and programmable robot, the Unimate, was installed in 1961 to lift hot pieces of metal from a die casting machine and stack them.
Commercial and industrial robots are widespread today and used to perform jobs more cheaply and more reliably, than humans. They are employed in some jobs which are too dirty, dangerous, or dull to be suitable for humans. Robots are used in manufacturing, assembly and packaging, transport and space exploration, weaponry, laboratory research and the mass production of consumer and industrial goods. There are many types of robots. For example, a robot designed to travel across heavy dirt or mud, might use caterpillar tracks; the mechanical aspect is the creator's solution to completing the assigned task and dealing with the physics of the environment around it. Form follows function. Robots have electrical components. For example, the robot with caterpillar tracks would need some kind of power to move the tracker treads; that power comes in the form of electricity, which will have to travel through a wire and originate from a battery, a basic electrical circuit. Petrol powered machines that get their power from petrol still require an electric current to start the combustion process, why most petrol powered machines like cars, have batteries.
The electrical aspect of robots is used for movement and operation (robots need some level of electrical energy supplied to their motors and sensors in order to activate and perform b
University of Liverpool
The University of Liverpool is a public university based in the city of Liverpool, England. Founded as a college in 1881, it gained its royal charter in 1903 with the ability to award degrees and is known to be one of the six original'red brick' civic universities, it comprises three faculties organised into schools. It is a founding member of the Russell Group, the N8 Group for research collaboration and the university management school is AACSB accredited. Ten Nobel Prize winners are amongst its alumni and past faculty and the university offers more than 230 first degree courses across 103 subjects, its alumni include the CEOs of GlobalFoundries, ARM Holdings, Tesco and The Coca-Cola Company. It was the world's first university to establish departments in oceanography, civic design and biochemistry at the Johnston Laboratories. In 2006 the university became the first in the UK to establish an independent university in China, Xi'an Jiaotong-Liverpool University, making it the world's first Sino-British university.
For 2017-18, Liverpool had a turnover of £543.9 million, including £95.6 million from research grants and contracts. It has the fifth largest endowment of any university in England. Graduates of the university are styled with the post-nominal letters Lpool, to indicate the institution; the university has a strategic partnership with Laureate International Universities, a for-profit college collective, for University of Liverpool online. The partnership provides the technical infrastructure to deliver courses worldwide; the university was established in 1881 as University College Liverpool, admitting its first students in 1882. In 1884, it became part of the federal Victoria University. In 1894 Oliver Lodge, a professor at the university, made the world's first public radio transmission and two years took the first surgical X-ray in the United Kingdom; the Liverpool University Press was founded in 1899, making it the third oldest university press in England. Students in this period were awarded external degrees by the University of London.
Following a royal charter and act of Parliament in 1903, it became an independent university with the right to confer its own degrees called the University of Liverpool. The next few years saw major developments at the university, including Sir Charles Sherrington's discovery of the synapse and William Blair-Bell's work on chemotherapy in the treatment of cancer. In the 1930s to 1940s Sir James Chadwick and Sir Joseph Rotblat made major contributions to the development of the atomic bomb. From 1943 to 1966 Allan Downie, Professor of Bacteriology, was involved in the eradication of smallpox. In 1994 the university was a founding member of the Russell Group, a collaboration of twenty leading research-intensive universities, as well as a founding member of the N8 Group in 2004. In the 21st century physicists and technicians from the University of Liverpool were involved in the construction of the Large Hadron Collider at CERN, working on two of the four detectors in the LHC. In 2004, Sylvan Learning known as Laureate International Universities, became the worldwide partner for University of Liverpool online.
The university has produced ten Nobel Prize winners, from the fields of science, medicine and peace. The Nobel laureates include the physician Sir Ronald Ross, physicist Charles Barkla, physicist Martin Lewis Perl, the physiologist Sir Charles Sherrington, physicist Sir James Chadwick, chemist Sir Robert Robinson, chemist Har Gobind Khorana, physiologist Rodney Porter, economist Ronald Coase and physicist Joseph Rotblat. Sir Ronald Ross was the first British Nobel laureate in 1902; the University is associated with Professors Ronald Finn and Sir Cyril Clarke who jointly won the Lasker-DeBakey Clinical Medical Research Award in 1980 and Sir David Weatherall who won the Lasker-Koshland Special Achievement Award in Medical Science in 2010. These Lasker Awards are popularly known as America's Nobels. Over the 2013/2014 academic year, members of staff took part in numerous strikes after staff were offered a pay rise of 1% which unions equated to a 13% pay cut since 2008; the strikes were supported by both the university's Guild of Students and the National Union of Students.
Some students at the university supported the strike. The university is based around a single urban campus five minutes walk from Liverpool City Centre, at the top of Brownlow Hill and Mount Pleasant. Occupying 100 acres, it contains 192 non-residential buildings that house 69 lecture theatres, 114 teaching areas and research facilities; the main site is divided into three faculties: Life Sciences. The Veterinary Teaching Hospital and Ness Botanical Gardens are based on the Wirral Peninsula. There was a marine biology research station at Port Erin on the Isle of Man until it closed in 2006. Fifty-one residential buildings, on or near the campus, provide 3,385 rooms for students, on a catered or self-catering basis; the centrepiece of the campus remains the University's original red brick building, the Victoria Building. Opened in 1892, it has been restored as the Victoria Gallery and Museum, complete with cafe and activities for school visits Victoria Gallery and Museum, University of Liverpool.
In 2011 the university made a commitment to invest £660m into the'Student Experience', £250m of which will be spent on Student Accommodation. Announced so far have been two large On-Campus halls of residences (the first of which, Vine Court, opened September 2012, new Veterinary Science facilities, a £10m refurbishment of the Liverpool Guild of Students. New Central Teaching Laboratories for physics, earth sciences, chemistry an
