About 20 students gathered outside the Outpost Grill Wednesday to see a demo of projects created by senior engineering students.
James Coolidge, Garrett Chan, Gilbert Napenas, Nephtali Mendoza and Mario Madrigal are engineering majors whose project has drawn attention, since they have been testing it in front of the Outpost for several weeks.
Many students were asking the group if they were building a battlebot or a transformer. The wildest thing the group was asked is if they were recreating Wall-E, the Disney movie character.
“People have been asking what it is, but are disappointed when they find out it’s a lawnmower,” Coolidge said.
The group built an autonomous navigator that uses GPS, sonar and radar to scan an area and mow a field. Simply put, they are building a robotic lawnmower that does the mowing on its own.
“It goes to any of four coordinates and mows the area inside the coordinates,” Coolidge said.
The demo turned out to be a great success not just for this group of students, but for another group of students displaying their project.
The other group of students built what they called a “hexacopter” with six spinning blades that levitate it from the ground. The “hexacopter” was remote controlled and flew successfully for roughly two minutes before landing.
For Coolidge’s group, the creation of the robotic lawnmower is just the beginning for them. The group is planning on submitting the project to the Institute of Navigation (ION) for the ninth annual ION robotic lawn mower competition in Beavercreek, Ohio.
The objective of the competition is to design and operate a robotic unmanned lawn mower using navigation to rapidly and accurately cut a field of grass.
Chan said the group had gone back and forth from the drawing board with this project.
“We are full-time students with other projects and classes, so we can’t go back to the drawing board as much as we’d like to,” Chan said.
The group said they hope their efforts with this project will lead to job opportunities with the either the Institute of Navigation or the Air Force.