A team of three UT robot-building engineering students will be featured on the Do It Yourself Network in May.
UT’s robotics team consisted of graduate students Jason Lang and Jason Fultham, as well as Landon Messal, a senior in mechanical engineering. The three students will face off against the team from the University of California at Berkeley in an episode of “Robot Rivals.”
“Robot Rivals is a series of 13 shows on DlY, which is a national cable network located in Knoxville,” said Dee Haslam, executive producer of the show. “Fourteen colleges in all participate in the series, which is set up in tournament style brackets.”
At the beginning of the show, the teams are taken to a warehouse where they are given the tools to create a robot to perform a specific task.
“The students are given a day to do the assignment,” Haslam said. “They are put in a lab that has every imaginable part that you could possibly need. Each show is different. Each competition brings a new task, and it gets harder as they progress.”
In the UT matchup, the team came up with a robot to move toys.
“The UT team’s task was to locate and move toys,” Haslam said. “The idea was to get a robot to put toys up for the kids if the parents can’t get them to it. The teams were given two engineer helpers to aid them in their creative process. In the end, UT designed a robot with a shovel on the front. The robot moved the toys up and flipped it on its back.”
Not only must the team create a functioning robot in a day, the creators also throw in a catch.
“To build it in a day, makes the show exciting,” Haslam said. “In the middle of the show, the teams are given a surprise item to put in the robot. In this episode, the team used gardening tools as scoopers; they get points for using as many of the surprise items as they can. It’s a twist thrown in to make it more entertaining.”
As the show begins to catch on, producers hope to involve more regular people.
“For now, it’s only college students,” Haslam said. “Robotics is their world. It’s something they do and are interested in. Eventually as robotics catches on, it will go to the audience.”
At the end of the day, everyone felt confident in UT’s performance.
“We thought the UT students did a fantastic job,” Haslam said. “We would be interested in bringing UT back in a second season if they can get a team together. UT is a great resource for us to use.”
Although the show premiered on April 18, the UT episode airs May 9 at 9 p.m.
