A semester of hard work earned students from UF's College of Engineering the chance to play Dr. Frankenstein for one afternoon.
Students brought their creations to life inside the Harris Corporation Rotunda of the New Engineering Building after constructing robots over the course of the semester for their Intelligent Machines Design Laboratory class.
"Their job is to build a robot from scratch," said Eric M. Schwartz, one of the professors for the course.
The engineers impressed a crowd of onlookers with about 20 robots that performed tasks over a two-hour time period.
One robot was programmed to navigate through a maze looking for a fire, and once the fire was located, "Cool Breeze" approached and extinguished the flame using carbon dioxide.
Other bots were designed to serve as a ball machine for tennis players, a marshmallow roaster and an alarm.
"The most practical as far as what can be used in a product today is the bartender robot," Schwartz said.
Sarit Patel, a second-year computer engineering graduate student, created an autonomous drink retriever called "Reeb"-"beer" backwards - that he feels could be useful in a slow bar scenario.
"I had no ideas to begin with," Patel said. "But I thought no one likes to wait for their drinks, so if you could automate the bar process, that could be useful."
In Patel's demonstration, would-be patrons scanned a card with one of three drinks on it - coke, orange crush or root beer - and Reeb navigated a large piece of plywood, which served as a bar top, to one of three shelves containing the correct beverage. After scooping up the bottle, Reeb retreated back to the ordering station to hand off the drink.
Patel estimated putting in 10 to 15 hours of work per week on his robot, which runs on 17 AA batteries.
Schwartz has been involved in the class for 11 years now, and he said all anyone has to do to get involved in working with robotics is walk into his lab.
Few students walk into his class knowing everything they need to build a successful robot, which is why Schwartz encourages a non-competitive working environment.
"(The robots) are little babies, and they want to make their babies the best that they can be," Schwartz said. "You want your baby to win the national championship, and so this is their chance to do it."
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