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(natural sound)
Each year they have a different
scenario.This year we're designing a robot for a
farm industry and we have several tasks to complete.
First of which is to collect a stalk of corn.
We also start with a hay bale on our robot and we
deposit that onto a conveyor belt. This is the first
course for freshman. The first course you learn how
to do design elements, how to draw sketches. Second course
teaches you how to program and then it all culminates
in the robot competition as you put all that together. So you really learn the tools
that you need to prepare for this. I focused on the building aspect of it.
It's kind of what I'm interested in and it's really given me a lot of experieince how
to work with a team, different design elements, and really, you know,
having fun doing what I like to do. We have number of culminating events
every year at this time. These are design build projects, as we call them.
We have, for example, our very well known Honors Robotics
project in St. John Arena, major roller coaster
design competition, and we aslo have our Capstone
design showcase which is primarily for seniors, but also included
freshman honors students. We have
50 Capstone senior design projects here that involve
well over 200 engineering students. We have well over
20 companies represented. I think this a great opportunity for the students
to display their hard work. Not only on the projects themselves, but
to culminate their engineering academic experience
as well. One of the things that we try to do at John Deere is that we try
to give projects that have actual meaning. That
if the students are successful, they're going to provide something to us
that is useful to John Deere as a company. They see how their
project can interface with some of the other parts of what we do as a company.
Our project was to design an automated inspection sysytem for
Rockwell Automation that would tell a operator, in real time,
if they had assembled a logic module unit correctly.
They provided funding for us to develop a prototype project,
as well as guidance. Working with Rockwell Automation
overall it was very good experience and got quite a bit out of working with
an industry sponsor, because that's not really something you get to do everyday. I learned
a lot of practical things along the way, not only how to apply my coursework
but how real-world projects are defined and how they
challenge us and how to meet those specific challenges. It's something that school doesn't
teach you and that this project did. And I'm very thankful that I got this experience.
Our project is start with a standard SUV
and get 30% better
drag in that you'd get more fuel economy. So what we did
was we used computer simulations and actually built a physical model
and tested it in a wind tunnel. We ended up with about 39% drag reduction.
So we beat our goal and we're very happy about that.
This was a great experience working with the students and working with Honda because
this project is very important to Honda's future. They kind of got
to work alongside all of us, the engineers at Honda,
in the wind tunnel and it kind of opens them to how it is outside
of student life. (natural sound)
Basically, the competition revolves around who has the best features
and how well your roller coaster functions.
In the beginning, we worked on getting our bearings straight on how
to do the math. You know, how to design it and probably the second half of the quarter revolved
entirely around constructing, trial and error, and
designs. You always do all this calculus, all these physics equations
and you know it's just kind of a drag to just do it in class. This kind
lets you make your own equation, kind of, and then kind of put it to the test.
It makes it fun I guess. It's a lot of fun.
Engineering tends to be tedious sometimes going through the calculations,
going through for formulas and you get to apply that to something that you can actually relate to.
It's a good opportunity for engineers, especially first-year engineers, to get to see what engineering
can lead to, what kind of things you can do with the applications of engineering principles.
All of these are the end product of ten weeks of work.
It's not just a matter of building something. It's really
more designing, building, and testing. All of this
involves communication, involves team work, project management
and a lot of technical skills as well. That's as much real-world as we
can make it. And this serves them very well when they go out for
internships and co-ops. We hear this from our industry sponsors all the time.
They really like the fact that the students have had to work on large-scale projects
They've had to write about them, they've had to do oral presentations about them.
And I think that is in large part why we also have
corporate sponsorship, industry involvement with these projects.