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January 17, 2005 Vol. 76,
no. 1S
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| COOL CUBISM:
This senior ME design team built a robot to solve a Rubik's
Cube. The Fall ME 102B Design Expo featured ME seniors strutting
four years of engineering stuff, from a new BMW car part to the
next party must-have: tabletop fountain-graphic equalizer. |
The serious
business of inventing fun - ME design expo features the playful as
well as the practical
It was mesmerizing and a
little goofy. While the haunting music of Alicia Keyes's "Falling" poured
from a nearby stereo, a plastic volcano erupted water, subsided, and
erupted again in rhythm to the music. Sort of child's science experiment
meets miniature Vegas water display. Whether it was the cool music or
weird gurglings, students visiting the ME 102B Design Expo in December
couldn't walk past the project without stopping.
"It's pure entertainment," explained then-ME senior (now alumnus) Phil
Roan, who helped build it. "We really like listening to music and watching
things." With this in mind, Roan and his teammates came up with their
tabletop fountain-graphic equalizer, which they dubbed "Dancing Leprechaun."
(The name came from the team's original idea, which, excuse the pun,
never got off the ground.)
The official theme of ME professor Liwei Lin's class expo was innovation,
but often that meant fun. Picture the Roll-Bot, for example: Someone
places the robot-car atop a large cylinder. They push the cylinder and
it starts to roll forward. The car senses the motion. It rolls, too,
so it doesn't plunge forward onto the table. ME seniors Chase Krieger,
Lindsay Long, Yan Wu, Mark Moyes, Kayur Patel and Christina Naify worked
on it; a couple of them were celebrating the 'bot's completion with
beers. What do they plan to do with their creation? "Maybe keep it for
amusement," replied Long.
By far the most popular project was the Cal Cube Conqueror, which easily
conquered the crowd that was jostling two or three deep to see it. The
demonstration went like this: After the robot calibrated itself, a team
member placed a Rubik's Cube inside it. Sensors read the colored squares
and sent information to a nearby laptop. The laptop generated the most
optimal solution and sent the information back to the Conqueror whose
mechanical arms gently turned the Cube. Problem solved.
ME seniors Chris Ward, Adam Fischbach, Marco Alvares, Jaleh Rezaei,
and Suzy Park presided over the Conqueror's success. "Marco had a [Rubik's]
Cube on his desk and spent many sleepless nights trying to solve it,"
says Park. "So he told us, 'Let's make a robot to solve it,' and that's
how we got the idea."
ME senior To Tan got his team's idea from playing tennis. "I got tired
of picking up my tennis balls," he said. So he and his teammates designed
"The Puppy," a small robot car that scooted around the floor collecting
tennis balls. "It's stupid like a puppy," remarked teammate Danny Leang,
another ME senior. "Curious, too."
Some projects were more serious. Team AutoMoto3 Mirror designed an automatic
rearview mirror for BMWs with help from the company itself. The team
will hold further talks with the carmaker, members reported with glee.
"We'd like to work for BMW, of course!"
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