Resources
Computing
Students on the course make use of the Department of Informatics' own computing facilities. Students have access to these facilities from the MSc computing laboratory, which is equipped with professional workstations (Dell Precision range) running Windows 7. Program development environments include Netbeans, Visual Studio, BlueJ, and Eclipse; programming languages include Java, C++, C#, Visual Basic, Python, Perl, Haskell, Prolog and Lisp. All Informatics users have remote access to interactive Linux servers. High quality printing and scanning facilities are available and wireless connectivity is good in the lab.
Robots and Autonomous Systems Lab
The EASy group have a number of robots used for research, including two walking robots (one hexapod, one octapod), two differential-steer wheeled platforms, and a "gantry" robot used for studying visual guidance from 50Hz video input. Several small Khepera mobile robots are available for teaching and research. A variety of in-house software systems can be used for robot research, including the Khepsim Khepera robot simulator.
Also available is the Autonomous Systems Laboratory, with purpose-built robot components for all to gain some hands-on experience with real robots. For those who wish to pursue this further, there are facilities for building and experimenting with robots on projects.
Library
Informatics has its own library, which houses a large collection of technical reports from other research institutions and a number of relevant books and conference proceedings. The main University of Sussex library holds copies of books and journals (many of them online and accessible remotely) needed for the MSc.