“This company actively supports anyone and everyone passionate about utilizing high quality, reliable computing and I/O products for any type of engineering endeavor,” says Ben O’Hanlan, Sealevel Systems’ vice president of business development. That now includes a high school student who was recently approached by a zoo to design a system for exercising elephants.
Rohan Jhunjhunwala, a student at the Catlin Gabel School in Portland, OR and a mechanical engineering leader on the school’s FIRST robotics team, undertook the assignment to build a robotics system for the elephants at the Oregon Zoo not as a school project but out of his passion for robotics and technology.
The original robotics system, consisting of two sensors and a conveyor belt, was built by students from Portland State University. But the undocumented system eventually fell into disrepair. Three other students from the Catlin Gabel School created a solution for the feeding aspect of the project, leaving Jhunjhunwala to develop a mechanism for exercising and entertaining the elephants.
“My robot will consist of three main parts,” said Jhunjhunwala. “The first is the apple launcher, which will launch apples into the elephant pen. The second is the motion sensors. These will make the elephant run to each side of the pen to get their food. The third is by far the most ambitious, and the most beneficial, should it work. It is an elephant piano. Using capacitive sensors, I will build a 4-key keyboard on a brick wall that the elephants can play. The sound will come from a loudspeaker behind the wall. If the elephant plays the right sequence of notes using its trunk, it will be rewarded in the form of a bundle of hay or an apple.”
The Right Technology Partner
Before beginning to build the robotics system, Jhunjhunwala assembled a wish list of parts. He found Sealevel Systems through Internet research and from talks with his mentor, Dale Yocum, who had “known about Sealevel by reputation for years.” After contacting Bryan Buchanan in Sealevel’s technical support division, Jhunjhunwala found the R1000 computer with a 420S digital I/O module to be a perfect fit for the controller element of his project.
“He also wanted something small and mountable,” says Buchanan. “The 420 would provide the IO solution for him since he needed Form C relays and more than 8 optically isolated inputs. Both modules mount together and would be pleasing aesthetically and functionally.”
With funding secured for his apple launcher, Sealevel supplied two products to help Jhunjhunwala build his robot. He hopes that his system can be replicated at other locations. With help from the Sealevel products, he can write Java code to provide the zookeepers a visual interface with better information about how the system is working and let them change the challenges given to the elephants.
Jhunjhunwala has been coding and building intensively over the summer and hopes to have things operational in prototype form in the fall. The final product will be completed in time for his school’s science fair in March.