Savannah Brown '15 Presented at UA Engineering Design Day

The student inventions at the University of Arizona College of Engineering’s 17th annual Engineering Design Day are pushing the boundaries of what’s possible. “Design Day is an exciting opportunity for the public to see what students in the College of Engineering are working on,” said Interim Dean Larry Head. “It’s the best day of the year, because we get to watch student teams present the results of two semesters’ worth of design, development, testing and delivering on projects that have real impact on people’s lives.”

 

Goggy Davidowitz, associate professor in the UA Department of Entomology, believes in a future where bugs are a major source of protein and cattle ranchers raise grasshoppers instead of beef. But to eat grasshoppers, you have to catch them first. Because grasshoppers are pests that eat crops, farmers also need a way to remove them from their fields. A method for safely capturing grasshoppers would not only allow Davidowitz to further his research into insect protein, it would also provide a solution for organic farmers who don’t want to use bug-killing pesticides.

 

Davidowitz asked a team of UA Engineering seniors, including Salpointe alumna Savannah Brown ’15 (pictured far left), to create an autonomous grasshopper harvesting device to collect grasshoppers without harming them.

 

The students are basing their design on “hopper dozers,” horse-drawn collection bins farmers used to capture grasshoppers in the 19th century. When they get startled, grasshoppers jump in whatever direction they happen to be facing, so by building a structure that’s several feet wide, the team believes they can capture most of the grasshoppers in the vehicle’s path. The autonomous nature of the vehicle means it can sense when it’s full or when its battery is running low and return to a home base.

 

“We learned a lot about artificial intelligence and finding the quickest path to a solution,” said team lead and electrical and computer engineering major, Cooper Wynn. “The biggest thing in technology right now is autonomous vehicles, and this gave us a chance to work with one and kind of design our own.”