Lafayette College: Where Animatronic Groundhogs Eat Your Homework
Vegan? There’s an app for that. Electronic pie-throwing? There’s a tweet for that. Animatronic shadow-detecting? Thanks to some talented students at Lafayette College in Pennsylvania, there may be a system for that sometime in the very near future.
Chris Nadovich—director of laboratories in the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department at Lafayette—was so intrigued by our request to the Groundhog Club’s Inner Circle to replace Punxsutawney Phil with an animatronic groundhog that he created a project for his students, asking them to develop a shadow-detection system that would help an animatronic Phil “see” his shadow. Right now, five teams of two students each are slated to begin working on this project, which will be completed by the end of April.
We can’t wait to see what Nadovich’s class comes up with. In the meantime, we’re already working on a name for the new technology. Our suggestion: “iShadow.” What would you call the groundbreaking (and groundhog-liberating) innovation?
Written by Logan Scherer
