Three Dartmouth engineering majors came up with a unique solution last fall to removing fallen leaves from the lawn: use a refrigerator.
Alex Price '04, Nikhil Manchanda '04 and Luis Carrio travelled to Knoxville, Tenn., in November to participate in Robot Rivals, a tournament-style engineering competition now airing in its first season on the Do-It-Yourself Network. The program pitted them against teams from 13 other universities in a contest to see who could build the most capable robot.
Robot Rivals is not just another Battlebots. Unlike the Comedy Central show, the goal of each match is not to crush the opposition into scrap, but to design and construct a robot to accomplish a specific task, such as filling a toy box, climbing stairs or traversing a ravine. Teams are told the nature of their task and furnished with a partial equipment list just two weeks prior to the competition and are allotted only six hours to cobble their robot together from a warehouse full of spare parts.
The Dartmouth team squared off against a team from Union College of New York in a head-to-head match in which their task was to collect as many faux "leaves" as possible from a playing field roughly the size of a racquetball court. The winning team with the heaviest pile of leaves after three minutes advanced to the next round and a new task.
Although the DIY Network prohibits competitors from revealing the outcome of the tournament before the episodes air this spring, the team reported that their robot performed extremely well.
"Essentially, we built a remote-controlled vacuum cleaner," team captain Price said. The team's design used a pair of ventilation fans to suck the leaves off the floor and direct them into the metal frame of a refrigerator jury-rigged as a collection bin.
All three team members agreed that the most challenging aspect of the event was working under extreme time pressure, a constraint that highlighted the gap between the theory and actual practice of engineering.
"We just had to change this and bang on that until it worked," Carrio said.
Each team also employs an advisor who provides some technical advice and acts as liaison to the cameras while the team concentrates on the competition. The Dartmouth team turned to former BattleBots champion Brian Nav, to do some of the electrical wiring on the radio controller but accomplished the majority of the mechanical engineering themselves.
The first season of Robot Rivals is airing now on the DIY Network. The second season will begin in early April, with the Dartmouth team appearing in the middle of the season.
