The robo-apocalypse is almost here if a recently designed robot grows even stronger. A team of engineers from Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences have built a bot that would go up against the best of the best battle bots and then just simply shoot them down.
A recent competition named the Mech-Warfare Contest was held at Sheperd Univeristy at an annual meeting called ShepRoboFest. The Harvard boys’ robot was the winning robot. In the competition, the robots shot BB-guns at enemy robots which would then result in the robot getting points. The engineers would sit in a different room and would control the robots and let them fight,
The engineers are part of a team named the Harvard Undergraduate Robotics Club (HURC) and has been designing the robot for two years before they started to build it over a collection of months.
John Alex Keszler, a student studying electrical engineering in the group, spoke to Harvard’s website and said: “There was a real watershed moment when we finally had the code and structure, so we put it on the table in the Active Learning Labs. sent the signal a few times, and eventually, it stood up. In a split second, it went from being a just a pile of rubble and wires to a ‘living machine’.”
One of the flaws the engineers does admit is that the robot’s walking is not ideal. Just imagine that thing walking towards you and trying to shoot you.
“We built this robot almost completely from scratch. In a way, it is kind of like our child. This is, by far, the coolest thing I’ve ever built. It was such an immensely powerful moment to watch our creation compete,” said Timothy Tamm, one of the students getting his qualifications in computer science. “One of the things we strive for at HURCS is to make everybody a multidisciplinary engineer. Everybody comes to us with an area of comfort and expertise, but we all got out of our comfort zones to help produce the robot. I think everyone of us has learned a new skill and become a broader engineer from working on this project.”
Source: Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences