Robotic presidential candidates vie for votes

Stanford Engineering students apply electronics smarts to mock election.

Sixteen teams of mechanical engineering students competed to build the winning robotic presidential candidate in a mock election that doubled as the final project presentations in the Winter 2012 Introduction to Mechatronics (ME210) course.

Bit Romney, Michelle Botman, Tron Paul and Barak Robama, among others – ran in the so-called Robots Instead of People (RIP) Party’s primary elections, with Botman emerging as the winner.

Sixteen teams of mechanical engineering students competed to build the winning robotic presidential candidate in a mock election that doubled as the final project presentations in the Winter 2012 Introduction to Mechatronics (ME210) course.

Bit Romney, Michelle Botman, Tron Paul and Barak Robama, among others - ran in the so-called Robots Instead of People (RIP) Party's primary elections, with Botman emerging as the winner.

Students had to apply their knowledge of electronics, event-driven software programming design, and engineering manufacturing processes to build the robots, which were required to pick up tokens ("campaign contributions") from token bins ("$uper PACs") and drop them into five seesaws that represented each of the most important U.S. state primaries. In each round of competition, the robo-candidate that won the most primaries (tipped the most seesaws) advanced to compete in the next round.

Botman edged candidate RIP Van Winkle by one state in the finish.

Last modified Tue, 14 Aug, 2012 at 13:29