School of Business | Placement Open Evening
6 October 2026 | EVENT
The Tridimeter: Engineering New Ways to Study the sounds of Nature
Dr Rob Chandler’s lecture presents a research journey that brings together engineering, mathematics, and environmental science to address an urgent ecological challenge. It begins with a brief personal introduction, outlining the speaker’s technical background, experience with patented technologies, and the motivations behind the work. The lecture then places the research within a wider environmental context, highlighting humanity’s entry into the Anthropocene, accelerating biodiversity loss, and the onset of a sixth mass extinction. This leads to a focus on bats as ecologically important yet often understudied species, with particular attention to bat populations in Gibraltar that form the basis of the doctoral research.
A concise review of the literature identifies key gaps, notably the absence of effective three-dimensional techniques for studying bats in flight and a significant bias within existing research outputs. The mathematical foundations of the work are then introduced, showing how trigonometric principles applied to sound propagation, sensor arrays, and triangulation led to the development of a novel algorithm.
The lecture centres on the Tridimeter system, a proposed method for three-dimensional bat tracking. Field results are presented, demonstrating success rates of 66–75%, alongside an honest discussion of system limitations and future developments.
