The year 3 Design & Manufacturing students put their knowledge and training to use to design and build walking robots that would have to autonomously navigate a fixed obstacle course. The students were presented with this robotics challenge as part of their Mechatronics course in the B.A.Sc. in Manufacturing and Design Engineering.

The devices were designed by the students, supervised by Dr Jorrel Bisnath and Mr. David Edwards.  They funded the projects themselves, some of them obtaining corporate sponsorship. This was the first time that the students had been faced with a system that contained so many degrees of freedom and programming the coordination of the actuators to achieve stable walking movements was a fairly complex task.  They rose to the challenge!  Each of the bots employed a different strategy for both walking and navigation and at the end, the judges decided to share winning honours amongst three.

The Design and Manufacturing Unit continues to encourage our students to interact with current and relevant technology in our programmes and strives to maintain the high standard within our internationally accredited (IET) degree

Kristoff Ayers, Chrystal Edwards and Davidial Sharma with their bot.

 Keril Jackson, Kimlan Chin, Naresha Jugmohan, Nikita Kaiten and Judah Stewart with their bot.