From our first year of Alumni we had a big trophy made of welded machine parts and making a weak attempt to combine all the aspects of our program, it also doubled as a beer bong. However what we wanted was something similar to WESST’s mascot Debbie, the concrete Donkey. It’s more iconic and easy to get attached to than a 50lb inanimate jumble of machine parts.

So after a committee meeting, I came of with a concept for a Mechatronics robot which followed the style of Pixar’s Wall-E.

I named him MAD-E (Mechatronics Autonomous Alcoholic Drink Expeller).

The idea was to have this little box robot follow people around autonomously and fire beer cans out it’s top. Some of the features i would have included are:

• RC chassis and battery
• MCU Autonomous and remote control
• Camera to use for tracking and obstacle detection
• LED Matrix display on the front to display faces and ‘emotions’
• Cooling unit that can store at least 6 cans
• Mechanism to transfer cans into cannon
• Some sort of mechanism to fire cans out the top
• A speaker and maybe a vibrator to get pre-programmed behavioral quirks in

Since the robot was fairly complex the plan was to execute project development over 3 years and commit a certain amount of resources every semester. However, the primary resource no one had to spare was time and almost no one was willing to commit to it. I would have been happy to lead the project, but with no members it was a flop from the beginning.

In the end we decided to keep the beer bong as our mascot, albeit we fixed it up so it was a bit more presentable.

I guess an autonomous beer dispensing robot that will follow me around will continue to be a dream for the future.