San Diego is a hotbed of ideas in science and medicine. Some of the nation's most successful biotech companies are here. When those companies want fresh ideas, they often turn to the young minds at UC San Diego. It's "Engineer's Week" on campus. KPBS reporter Andrew Phelps visited an "extreme science fair." He has this report.
Photo: UCSD engineering students Chris Schmidt-Wetekam, David Zhang, and their robots
Chris Schmidt-Wetekam, David Zhang, and their award-winning robots, iHop and iLean. (Andrew Phelps/KPBS)
There are nearly 300 graduate students here, all with big ideas, all competing for $1,000 and the wandering eyes of prospective employers.
My name David Zhang.
My name is Chris Schmidt-Wetekam.
David and Chris are both Ph.D. candidates at UCSD's Jacobs School of Engineering. Their big idea came from a single question on a final exam:
Can you stabilize a pogo stick without somebody on board?
That man wrote the question. Professor Tom Bewley runs the university's robotics lab. Now he's helping David and Chris answer the question. Here's what they came up with: Underactuated Autonomous Ground Vehicle Platforms for Stair-Climbing and Steep Terrain Negotiation. In other words, it's a robot that hops.
Chris: Essentially, with our hopping robot we kind of have a neat design feature which allows us to gradually store energy using small motors.
That energy is stored in a spring.
Tom Bewley: And then this forebar mechanism has this locking capability that it can lock shut. You can gradually accumulate energy in the spring, you can get moving quickly and then pow, release the thing, get airborne, and you can clear a hole in the ground or clear an obstacle.
They call it iHop, lowercase I, capital H, of course. Chris says iHop has practical applications.
Chris:The initial source of funding was from Los Alamos and the Department of Energy, and the, sort of, motivation was unmanned stockpile surveillance, so to monitor the nuclear stockpile, where you wouldn't want to send a person in an environment where you would have to hop on to things and so forth.
The students also want toy companies to pay attention. They built a less complicated robot named iLean, iHop's non-hopping little sister. iLean can lift herself up, stand on her robotic tippy toes and lean onto an obstacle. Imagine a reverse Slinkee that seems to defy gravity.
A crowd has formed and this man in a business suit looks impressed.
Woei-Min Lin: Oh, very good, very good. Very interesting.
Woei-Min Lin works at SAIC, a San Diego company that builds technology for the military. He's eyeing the talent here because he says there's a shortage of engineers.
Lin: Especially high-quality ones, because a lot of people nowadays are more interested in going to Wall Street and making money. And also a lot of the students, they are really not studying science and engineering and mathematics as much as before. Look at other countries. They have a lot of other students in the engineering field.
But Lin says companies like SAIC need American-born engineers for special projects that need security clearance. And he says Americans seem more creative.
Lin: The education system here is very different from the education system at other place. Students here are more innovative because in the whole education system, we are giving people more opportunity to be innovative, and then to think about their own ideas, to be creative. OK, I have to go for a meeting.
As far as Chris and David are concerned, a job today would be nice, but…
Chris: I think that's being a little too optimistic.
After all, they've been coming to this fair for three years now.
David: But even if we don't get job offers today, with this on our resume, I'm sure it will be a lot easier getting a job in industry, as well.
We say good-bye and good luck to David and Chris.
Later on, I get this phone message.
Hi Andrew, this is Daniel Kane calling from UC San Diego. Just a quick update on the hopping robots, so Poster Number 164, which was Christopher Schmidt-Wetekam, he actually won the whole poster competition for Research Expo at UCSD.
Sounds like their work paid off. Last year's winner got a job at Yale on the spot.
Andrew Phelps, KPBS News.
