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Electrical engineering professors Fernando Rios-Gutierrez and Rocio Alba-Flores are well aware of what the human brain can accomplish.
Simple tasks – thinking, acting, reasoning and decision-making are routine. But, when the professors arrived on campus three years ago, they introduced a new curriculum connecting brain skills with technology.
The husband and wife team launched Georgia Southern’s robotics lab, where students can enroll in a mobile robotics capstone design course. This course doesn’t teach to the text, however – engineering technology students gain hands-on experience by designing their own robots in the lab.
This successful pairing of academics and technology has positioned the University within the emerging field of robotics research. A further offshoot of the course is the popular Robotics Team, a group of students who have designed a firefighting robot and a lawnmower robot, earning top honors in international competitions over the past two years under the advisement of Rios-Gutierrez and Alba-Flores.
“Initially, they developed very simple robots,” said Rios-Gutierrez. The second year, the team entered its first competition tying Georgia Tech for 12th place. “Right away, one of our students got a job offer from a company in California,” he said. Rios-Gutierrez said that the students built all of the robots from scratch, sometimes spending upwards of four hours each day in the lab.
Each member brings an academic strength to the group in programming, mechanical or electrical engineering. This is especially important, said Alba-Flores, because the construction of the robot is possible through students combining their knowledge. “The students gain a lot of confidence working in teams, and they are able to bring their ideas to the table,” said Alba-Flores. While one student’s concentration may be building, others, like physics major Samantha Jacobs, are experts in developing algorithms. Her contributions put the finishing touches on programming a robot’s movements.
“Our robots show corporations what Georgia Southern students can do,” said Ryan Smith, a senior electrical engineering technology major. “For example, this experience has taught me skills in the areas of motors, sensors and programming robots.”
“We have the ability to test different technologies that could be applied to real life situations,” said Rios-Gutierrez, explaining the benefits of the robotics curriculum.
One invention simulating a real-life situation is a computer-controlled robot that can detect an alarm for a fire in a house, garage or car. The students constructed an intricate maze through which the firefighting robot travels to extinguish a fire.
The team took top honors last year in the Expert Division at Trinity College’s International Firefighting Robotic Contest in Hartford, Conn., and earned an honorable mention in another category for having the most advanced robot, which featured 120 teams from China, Israel, Indonesia, Portugal, Korea, Canada and the United States. This year, their firefighting robot earned third place in the Expert Division, one of the highest categories in the competition.
One of the most technologically advanced robots in the lab is the team’s lawnmower, which won fourth place in last year’s international competition at Wright University in Dayton, Ohio.
Throughout a six-month-long building process, technological additions were made to the basic frame of a lawnmower as it was transformed into a robot. The “brains” of the robot are an on-board laptop computer that receives all of the information from sensors (including a GPS) and video camera, which control the navigation and identify objects and obstacles. The result is a lawnmower robot that can mow a specific area of grass. For an added challenge, the lawnmower had to navigate around flower beds, and an autonomous dog, simulating actual obstacles that humans encounter during yard work.
Georgia Southern’s foray into robotics has offered engineering students a place on the cutting edge of developments in the industry, and afforded them opportunities to pursue a range of career options. “Our students get excited, because they can apply their engineering knowledge directly to a project,” said Alba-Flores. “They have to solve very different, difficult problems, and when they enter the job market after graduation, they will have hands-on skills that apply to solving some of the same practical problems in the workplace.”