Team:Lethbridge HS/Engineering
Engineering Success
Engineering
We started our initial designing process. We wanted to make sure our robot was sturdy, so we added tank-like wheels that would prevent it from getting stuck. The solar panel on the top would harness enough energy to keep the robot moving.
Our plan was to create a collection of these robots to roam through our targeted area and spray our RNAI herbicide onto the Spotted Knapweed.
After attending the Tech Futures challenges, we received feedback that criticized our implementation process. Firstly, we overlooked the landscape of Waterton parks. The uneven ground and unpredictable sloping of the targeted land made our land robot unviable. Although we had tank-like wheels, it still wouldn’t be heavy and strong enough to climb hills and run over large obstacles without blowing our budget.
As well, designing and creating a self-directing robot car that ran on solar energy was completely out of our scope of knowledge. None of our group members had a background in coding robots, and learning from scratch would be time consuming and brain numbing.
Money was another issue. We vastly underestimated the cost of robot making, especially with the soaring prices of computer chips in our economy. We would need to win the lottery to fund an army of self-controlling robots with scanning technology and solar panels
To counter these logistical issues, we pivoted to using planes. Although this would require major funding, using planes would greatly increase the speed and efficiency of our application. Factors like obstacles and hills, coding robots, time spent on maintenance and surveillance would be eliminated.