Public invited: Robots at work and play as Cape college hosts tic-tac-toe competition
Imagine a future in which you come home from work and settle in for a game of tic-tac-toe with one robot while another serves you soft drinks and snacks.
That future is actually Thursday from 11 a.m. to 1 p.m., when Cape Cod Community College students show off the robots they have been designing and programming all semester. The public is invited to attend.
It is not the first time Rick Bsharah, department chair and associate professor of engineering, has had his students and their creations face off in an end-of-term challenge.
"For years, they were tucked away in the basement, and there wasn't room to invite the public," said Cape Cod Community College spokesman Patrick Stone. "But now we have the great hall in our new science building, and the competition will be in there."
Cape Cod Community College in late September opened the Frank and Maureen Wilkens Science and Engineering Center. It is a two-story, 37,000-square-foot building that acts as a hub of the West Barnstable campus and provides lab space for STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) classes.
Observers will have an opportunity to play tic-tac-toe for prizes with Simon and Baxter, Stone said, while a third unnamed robot delivers soft drinks and light snacks.
"Simon is designed to be a helper robot, so he's a pretty good size, the size of a large adult with two arms, while Baxter is more like a factory assembly worker, essentially just a mechanical arm," Stone said.
The students doing the competition are in Bsharah's “Introduction to Robotics” class. They learn, according to the course description, to design, build, program and test increasingly complex electro-mechanical robots with a focus on movement, perception and reasoning/planning.
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This article originally appeared on Cape Cod Times: Cape Cod Community College hosts robot tic-tac-toe competition
