Robotic Board Eraser (via YinYang Robotics)
To my professors, it was always annoying when the previous class left the board full of writing. For the students, it was always annoying trying to take notes and struggling to hear, as the professor faced the board to erase it. Le Zhang and Michael Lathrop, seniors at Cornell, created an autonomous eraser robot that may someday relieve professors from wasting precious lecture time. (Yes, I actually liked going to class)
The duo has produced a prototype with the body made of hot-glued legos, two wheels and uses 17 magnets to stick to the board. To make it autonomous, they employed an Atmel processor to it and connected sensors and microswitches to detect board boundaries and accelerometers to determine the direction it is facing.
The prototype is powered by 8 AA batteries, which make the bot top heavy and cause it to slip as it moves across the board. This will be fixed in future iterations, but for the mean time, the team has simply programmed the bot to correct its path after it tills 70 degrees downward. The bot starts out by using its sensors to find the top of the board and then zigzags from side to side as it moves down to the bottom.
The Cornell students plan on making everything smaller so it can move faster and will not need to correct its path as it does now. They also hope to patent their idea and commercialize it. As it is now, it is too heavy and slow to be considered a time saver, but the idea is still there. A refined robot eraser will definitely be useful.
Cabe
