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Discover ACES profiles the variety of activities, people and work happening in ACES today. Visit often to meet ACES faculty, researchers and students and discover how ACES impacts our lives.
Tiny LEGO® bricks. You stepped on them in the dark and you sucked them up in the vacuum cleaner. Eventually they found their way into every room in your house. But when your child decided to pitch the instructions and create his own intergalactic space station, you knew you'd found the perfect blend of entertainment and education. Guess what? Tony Grift, an instructor at the University of Illinois, agrees with you.
Grift, an assistant professor in agricultural engineering, challenged his students in Technical Systems Management (TSM) 221 to build robotic agricultural machines using LEGO Mindstorms kits. TSM 221 is an introductory course in power and machinery management and the students' first exposure to Agricultural Engineering after finishing their extra-departmental course load.
"The students loved it," said Grift. "I wanted to introduce them to automation in a more challenging manner than the traditional course in higher order computer language. This is a nice entry level for undergraduates."
Robolab, the programming tool used for the project, and developed in part by the educational division at LEGO Corporation, proved to be very suitable for students with no procedural language background, said Grift. Robolab is a simplified version of LabView, a program widely used in the engineering industry.
Students in the class were divided into four teams, and each team was given a project that mimicked a problem professional engineers face in precision agriculture. Team 1 was given the assignment of developing a tractor that could steer itself, guided by a black line, drawn on a board. Team 2 created an implement--a variable-rate applicator--to be pulled by the other team's tractor.
"The beauty of that," said Grift, "is that now you have two groups who have to talk to each other. Communication was essential for a satisfactory outcome."
The remaining two teams were given the task of demonstrating the problem of cornering during harvesting operations. Team 3 tried to develop an optimized system to steer an offset harvester through a 90 degree corner without leaving any crop standing.
"I don't think that it's actually possible," Grift said, "but they had a great time trying."
Initially, Team 4 was assigned a project to illustrate the 270 degree turn that a self-propelled harvester employs. The team elaborated on the assignment and developed a self-propelled autonomous machine that leaves a shed, enters the field, performs a harvesting operation using several 270 degree turns, and returns to the shed.
Grift received a $2,000 teaching-enhancement grant from College of ACES endowments to pay for the LEGO kits. The project received an award from the Information and Electrical Technologies division of the American Society of Agricultural Engineers, and Grift plans to ask for more money this year.
"I want to push this a lot further than what we're doing now," he said. "For instance, I want to use a camera to track the vehicles and downlink steering correction information to the vehicles through an infrared link."
Finally, (like any honest parent will admit), Grift said it's not just the kids who enjoy the LEGO challenge.
"It's great," he said, "when a faculty member can have this much fun."
Photo: Tony Grift, U of I agricultural engineer, instructs students in his Technical Systems Management class. Grift's students use automated LEGOs to construct miniature versions of farm machinery used in precision agriculture.