Rube Goldberg Demonstrations

[Jerry]

Mouse Trap Demonstrations Today in the Integrated Systems Course (CS 490, ECE 492, ME 492, and IME 492)


Student teams will be demonstrating their first assignment: Build a non-lethal Rube Goldberg Mouse Trap.

All are welcome to come watch.

Where: EB Auditorium

When: 3 â€ââ,¬Å" 4:15pm Today

 

[Bryan]

You may want to point out what a "Rube Goldberg Machine" is.  This wikipedia article covers it pretty well. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rube_Goldberg

[Shaun Martin]

We had to do a Rube Goldberg project for my science class in 8th grade.  :-D

EDIT: I'm sure it wasn't as complicated as what these students did though.

[Bryan]

It's funny you should say that.  By very definition a Rude Goldberg machine is unnecessarily complex.

[Jerry]

Here's the official Rube Goldberg Website:

http://www.rube-goldberg.com/

[Matthew Thomas]

Would it be possible to park taz out there so we could watch this online?

[Ross Mead]

For anyone that was unable to see the demonstrations today, I'd just like to mention that they were great!  I was really impressed with some of the designs that people came up with.  I could go into detail right now, but I think I will just post pictures and video on the Robotics: Integrated Systems Design website as soon as possible and respond to this post to let everyone know that the page has been updated.

During the last CAOS meeting, we were discussing possibly a robotics project as a possible CAOS event.  I've worked on coming up with robotics projects in the past (RoboCraft 2004 and 2005 FireBot Challenge), so I'm sure we could come up with something cool.  The other possibility is Botball, which is a nation-wide competition using LEGO robotics).  I've competed in this in previous years at both the high school and college levels, both in which our teams have ranked very high (the last time we competed, we took the 1st place seed, beating out the 2nd place team, University of California-Berkeley, by a score of 30-6)!  Honestly, you don't really need to have a whole lot of experience in the field of robotics to do these projects; though that knowledge is, of course, helpful, the projects are made to be fun! :-)  Beyond Botball is the new collegiate-level competition, which not only invites college students, but anyone interested in the topic!  Yes, you could be facing both NASA engineers and your techy grandma!  Though LEGOs are supplied, you can actually use any materials, microcontrollers, and/or sensors that you want!  I think that if we made this an event (maybe give out kits and talk about the project on one day, and then a few weeks later hold our own competitions against each other), we could set an upper score that, if surpassed, could lead to potentially talking to the Department of Computer Science about helping fund a trip to the national competition!  Is anyone interested in this?

Also (relating back to the actual purpose of this post), given that we have so few teams this semester in the robotics class, we can do demonstrations during the actual class time.  Thus, we've been thinking about doing most of the demos out in the atrium, or at least inviting people to come in and watch them.  Again, is anyone interested?  If so, we'll probably post announcements on the forums prior to the day of the demos.

For anyone who hasn't had the opportunity to mess with any sort of robotics, it really is a lot of fun!  If people want to play with some of the LEGO kits, I've got some in the lab and I may be able to lend them out.  If you're interested in robotics in general, feel free to contact myself or Dr. Weinberg.

... blabbing... over! :-D