Robots will zoom around UF on Wednesday afternoon.
Nine UF students will show off their robots at the New Engineering Building’s Harris Rotunda from 1 p.m. to 3 p.m. The robots, some of which can help people shop for groceries and collect tennis and golf balls, cost between $200 and $900 each to complete.
The students who are a part of the competition are in the Intelligent Machine Design Lab class at UF. This semester, there were 15 students in the class, and the best robots were selected for the competition.
"Only the best are going to be invited to the show," said Eric Schwartz, the associate director of UF’s Machine Intelligence Lab.
While 15 students usually take the class, 37 are enrolled for Spring. This is mostly because the professor who teaches the class, Antonio Arroyo, will be retiring after next semester, he said.
Schwartz said robots made in the class must operate on their own.
"When it’s controlled, we don’t call that a robot," he said. "We call that a stupid machine."
Students are encouraged to channel their creativity into their robot designs and names, Schwartz said.
Izhar Shaikh, a UF electrical and computer engineering master’s student, said it took him two and a half months and $400 to build his robot "Si-Fo," short for Sign Follower.
The robot reads arrows on signs and follows their directions, the 22-year-old said. If the sign has a right arrow, the robot will turn until it sees another sign and go to it.
Building Si-Fo was challenging, Shaikh said. Originally, he wanted the robot to detect color, not shape. But color changed if the lighting of a room did, which made creating Si-Fo difficult.
Shaikh said he wanted the robot he built to be unrestricted by language: Pictures are universal.
"It doesn’t matter if they know any language or not — they understand it," he said.
Contact Caitlin Ostroff at costroff@alligator.org and follow her on Twitter @ceostroff
PerFoRo, short for person following robot, was built by Sarthak Kaingade for his intelligent machine design lab class’s robot demonstration at the new UF Engineering building on Dec. 2, 2015. The 23-year-old UF electrical and computer engineering masters student built the robot in two and half months, costing $400 dollars. The robot is designed to be a shopping cart that follows its user.
