Back in my last years at Uni I was heavily involved with the MSESS (Mechatronics Systems Engineering Student Society). It was a very new student group since the MSE program was only 5 years old at the time and the Student Society had only been around for 2 or 3. With constant cycling of members as the course loads were heavy and people taking co-ops in all semesters around the year, it was hard to get the society off the ground. Once it was established though, we were very ambitious. One of the society’s goals was to develop a mascot (so it could be used at engineering conferences or aka being envied by other student societies and having it stolen).
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.