PEWAUKEE — The joy of playing air hockey is to compete against a less-experienced player and watch them fumble with the mallet. The thrill of victory is hearing the sound of the puck going into the opponent’s slot. Now, SMÌìµØÂÛ̳ County Technical College students created an air hockey robot to make the game a bit more challenging.
The robot can play, attack and defend.
Jason Solberg, automation systems technology instructor at WCTC, said manufacturers like AI and automation integration. Students learn about taking a process that might normally be done manually and find a way to automate it. They learn how to do industrial electricity, hydraulics and a lot of programming.
At the end of the AST program, students do a capstone project in a 16-week course.
Capstone projects are intended for students to demonstrate the different skills they learned throughout their classes. Solberg said some projects are made from scratch while other ones are modified from a previous capstone project.
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The air hockey robot was created the previous year, but it didn’t work. A new group of students, Wesley Lidwin, Tyler Solberg (Jason’s son) and Caleb Roubik reprogrammed it and fabricated the enclosure.
"They basically built the system," he said.
Lidwin is an alum of the AST program and is now pursuing a degree in electrical engineering. He said the only direction given was the project was intended for Discovery World. Lidwin said the first week of the course was stressful because they had to take in what they already had and what they wanted to improve on.
"It was a fun week trying to throw our brains at it and figure out what we wanted to do," Lidwin said.
The first accomplishment was the enclosure around it with 80/20 and polycarbonate pieces.
"That was a victory in our eyes. That top part took us eight weeks with issues ordering, cutting, and building and putting it together," he said.
Lidwin said it specked out perfectly as they planned it.
"The other fun part was the robot and the vision camera. I was allowed to program it all by myself. I spent a hundred hours outside of class just looking at code and making it better. My brain was stuck in there but I was having a ton of fun," he said.
Anytime he tried out something on the robot it excited him.
"I thought, ‘Ohhhh, serotonin,’" he said.
The students learn about what they might encounter in the field, such as deadlines, which was challenging for the students.
Lidwin said it was hard to complete the project in 16 weeks with all of their other commitments.
The students had to replace the robot twice and rewrite the code due to internal issues with it.
After the project was completed, Lidwin said he felt the most proud he has ever been.
"All three of us were enthralled with it. When we got the basic function working was a huge win. We were all psyched about it," he said.
The project was displayed at Discovery World in Milwaukee and showcased at WCTC. Jason Solberg posted a video on LinkedIn of the robot and it went viral. They were challenged to air hockey at a Chicago automation event to take on different robots.
The big question is if the robot can be beat and the answer is yes. There are three different levels on it: easy, medium and hard level.
"Me personally … I think I scored on it once. Our vice president of the college came in here and he got to score on it. It was on the hard level," he said.