Previous Year - History Home - Next Year

Members

  • Tom Lauwers
  • Brian Kirby
  • Dan Vogel
  • Fay Shaw
  • Aaron Solochek
  • John Palmisano

Group Photo

Projects

  • Underkill for MoboJoust
  • "The Flying Ginsu" helicopter robot

Awards/etc

  • Donation by Simon Mehalek of a lot of useful parts

Other Information/Notes

From Jonathan: The club was moved to the Planetary Robotics Building, now demolished for the new Gates CS complex. We got a gargantuan donation from Simon Mehalek, consisting of all of the stuff he had accumulated from defunct robotics projects during his time at Stanford, CMU, and government labs. He had it all in a giant dance studio in Sharpsburg, and had decided he was downsizing; so he talked about donating it all to a few different organizations, but we were the first to show up with a moving van. We moved into the entire PRB, which wasn't really in use at the time. It was awesome. A bunch of people in FRC were pissed ("you're just a f***ing club!") but I think Red was secretly pleased at our coup. That's pretty much how he got FRC.

We built a bunch of little robots. They changed the Mobojoust rules, stating that 10lbs was "probably overkill," and reduced it to 2lbs. So we built underkill, that carbo fiber wedge. It won too. The next year, there weren't any other competitors, so the competition died. Oh well. We built a small hovercraft that used optical mice to track its velocity, called "the flying Ginsu" after the propellers cut Anthony's hand. There were a number of other things going on that I don't remember well - Tom and Brian were beginning their dynasty and making Cerebellums and creating intro-courses for new club members.