Off and popping — Brian
Roy '00 starts his robot on a test run before the IVDS teams'
departure for METU in Ankara, Turkey.
At a demonstration on Thursday, a robot built by Brian
Roy and John Daley was having problems. Too much light was causing a
sensor to miss the cues that were to activate a pair of spinning blades to
pop balloons.
So on Friday, they adjusted the position of the sensors,
and just hours before they were to leave for Turkey, their machine was
finally getting it right, finding and popping 13 of 14 balloons along a
track.
Roy, Daley and five other Union students left Saturday
for a week at the Middle East Technical University in Ankara, Turkey, to
reunite with the students who have been their design partners over the
past several months.
The highlight of the visit will be a series of contests
to judge the design and performance of the robots. Among the judging
criteria will be how close the American and Turkish versions appear and
how well the autonomous machines perform their assignment: travel along a
straight, curved and inclined track, finding and popping balloons along
the way.
The Turkish students came to Union last fall for initial
design meetings. Since then, all design work has been done over the
Internet through the College's International Virtual Design Studios.
Union has sent three teams of students, all seniors, who
have been working with their Turkish counterparts. Team 1 includes Roy, a
mechanical engineer, and Daley, an electrical engineer. Team 2 includes
Sean Spindler-Ranta (ME), Dave Copeland (CS), and George Powers (CSE).
Team 3 includes Greg Williams (ME) and Kah Mun Low (EE).
Accompanying the students are Cherrice Traver and John
Spinelli, associate professors of electrical engineering and computer
science.
The teams will enter their robots in an international
contest to be broadcast on Turkish television. They also will have a few
days to tour the country.
Now in its fourth year, the International Virtual Design
Studio is the brainchild of Ron Bucinell, associate professor of
mechanical engineering. By partnering engineering students from Union with
students in Turkey, Bucinell says, Union students can better appreciate
that engineering is a global enterprise. “It is important to educate
engineers who can make decisions with a global perspective, who have the
breadth of knowledge to understand the socio-economic implications of what
they are doing,” he says. “This is why it is so important to
have engineering in a liberal arts environment, and why I feel our
engineering program is unique.”