Moonbots

Wednesday afternoon, our "Crew" went to the Tom Ridge Environmental Center. Right there, "The Electronic Dreamers", a group of five students who live about 12 miles from Erie, introduced us to their robot project they are currently working on for a national competition. Their job was to design and program robots which could be able to make life on the moon possible. However, the task was way harder because they themselves had to think about the possible problems and challenges one potentially faces living on the moon. The scientific group helped us to get into this issue by a practical experiment. Namely, by considering challenges like food production or energy management, we had to construct solutions to these problems using more creativeness than intelligence. You can see some of our engineering attempts below. The German students of our camp felt a little bit more comfortable because one of "The Electronic Dreamers" was actually German. He lived in the US to attend high school the preceding year and was communicating with us through Skype this time. After presenting our modest models, we felt a little bit intimidated by seeing the robot the US students designed. Some of its special features is that its upper part can spin by 360 degrees. Besides that, two of its wheels roll longways and the other two roll sideways, so it may change its motion direction extremely quick and can even roll diagonally if necessary. Since the junior genius did not finish their project completely by the time we were at the TREC, we all are excited to check out their process at a later time this week. After the Moonbots presentation, we took advantage of an another advantage at the Environmental Center, namely the incredible observatory where one can overview part of Presque Isle, the bay of Lake Erie, which is one of  the US Great Lakes.

Our engineering attempts:

The robot of The Electronic Dreamers: