READY, AIM, FIRE Engineering students showcase self-built robots made to fight cutout “zombies” to conclude a year long project

In all of the jesting about zombie apocalypse emergency plans, few perhaps have considered using robots to fight off the undead.
Emergency planners could look to engineers for help. Tuesday afternoon, freshman and sophomore students in mechanical engineering watched the robots that they spent the semester building attack zombie cutouts.
Each robot had two minutes to run along a track, hurl ping-pong balls at zombie cutouts and smack a zombie’s head off with a stick.
The project has been part of an engineering lab for the past few months. Students were assigned to teams early in the semester to construct robots out of pipe, circuit boards and a few other materials. The robots are autonomous, so the students had to spend a lot of time programming them to work properly.
Sensors on the robots detected infrared signals telling the robot to start and stop an attack. The goal was to do major damage to the zombies in as little time as possible.

Ellie Durupt, a freshman in mechanical engineering, said the project required a lot of hard work throughout the semester.
“It was hard,” Durupt said. “We did it a lot step-by-step.”
In addition to the technical mechanics involved in the robots’ function, students also built and programmed circuit boards.
“We’ve learned a lot about electrical engineering,” Durupt said.
Brian Butler, a sophomore in electrical engineering, explained the zombie-fighting robots were made of three major components: a power train, a reloader and a whacker.
Lea Vanderlinden, a freshman in mechanical engineering, was part of Durupt’s team for the lab work and competition and joked the biggest component in their robot’s construction was “time.” Even though the project was ongoing for some time, there were a lot of last-minute changes, Vanderlinden said.
“A lot of what we designed previously was completely changed in the last week,” she said.
Once they finished building their model, they spent the last week testing it.
“We tested it on the tracks,” Durupt said. “It’s doing everything it’s supposed to do, it’s just not accurate.”

Butler’s team’s robot was faring a little better.
“We had to make some modifications after we’d tried some things, but for the most part, it was simple enough,” Butler said.
There were many variables to be considered, even after the team had the robot’s routine down.
“So far, we’ve dialed each of the four tracks in, so it’s hitting all of them,” he said. “But with the battery voltage changing, it might be off a little bit.”
The experience gave the budding engineers a taste of what many mechanical engineers do on a daily basis — create.
“I like this part of engineering, when we build robots and then get to see them work, instead of just homework,” Durupt said.
The event was part of the U’s mechanical engineering Design Day. Juniors in the program competed in a similar event in which their robots formed alliances to build bridges to help “colonize Mars.” Seniors presented their design projects, such as a solar-powered helicopter and a self-balancing camera stabilizer.