Engineering students at Citadel show prowess
Imagine a little robot that rolls around after a tailgate party, scooping up soda bottles and cans with its metal arms and sorting them into separate compartments for recycling.
A group of Citadel students demonstrated a couple of prototypes Wednesday. One robot senses the difference between cans and bottles, while the other scoops them up a ramp into separate bags.
Put the two together, and you might have a marketable product.
The recycling robots were two of the concepts presented at the 2009 Citadel Electrical Engineering Design Symposium. The students explained their creations with a Powerpoint presentation in Grimsley Hall, but several demonstrated them in the lab before the show.
Coca-Cola challenged engineering students across the country to devise recycling robots. In January, the company opened in Spartanburg a facility it called the world's biggest plastic bottle-to-bottle recycling plant.
It's doubtful the students' robots will make it to market, but that wasn't really the idea, engineering professor John Peeples said. The exercises demonstrated that the students could work together as a team and solve problems, valuable points on their resumes as they move into the job market.
The exercises have certainly been paying off in that sense. In the 10 years that Peeples has been working with Citadel engineering students, every one of them has landed a job immediately after graduation, at an average starting salary of $60,000 a year, he said.
After the recent scandals that have shaken Wall Street, companies are particularly impressed by The Citadel's emphasis on ethics, he said.
"We have a whole list of companies that only hire Citadel graduates," he said.
The project that has the best chance of making it to market is a boat monitoring system called MyFleet, Peeples said. Marinas have already shown interest in the idea. Boat owners can track their vessels, team member Ben Hammett said.
"People have told me, 'That's so simple. Why didn't I think of that?' " he said before his presentation.
Isn't that the way it always is with the winning idea?
