The Flaming Robo Duckies have returned now in 2013! We started our team in 2011 and we now have 5 team members.
This years challenge is Natures Fury!
The challenge says that the teams must:
- Identify a problem in your area
- Create innovational solution
- Share with the public
- And present your solution at the tournament
We are in the Charlotte region and we started brainstorming ideas of what we should do. And when we came up with several topics we split them up and assigned them to different people. Some had two topics that were lighter than others and some were very large and you would have to have a partner. We had our topics as home work and at the next meeting we would share our results with the group and post it on our group site.
Every time one idea was obviously not going to work we would eliminate that one. After a while we had 3 that were working and we decided that we were going to pair up with someone and come up with a presentation and share it with the group.
The presentation ideas were about:
1) Lightning Rods; For this idea we thought about all of the storms that have knocked out the power around the Charlotte area this summer we took that and our research and created the idea of the lighting rod.
When the lighting was conducted through the rod it would go into an energy converter and be used as emergency electricity in case a power line was knocked out and you didn't have power. The problem was that you couldn't keep the power logger that a few Milliseconds and would not provide much power at all.
2) Electro-Magnet House for Earthquakes; Here we knew that Charlotte was very prone to earthquakes and we had quite a few of them over the last couple years. We looked at several different aspects of this problem and thought how about a house that was not affected by the earthquakes.
A house with a plate of electro-magnets at the bottom of the house and on the ground. There would be a spring underground and when the ground shifted the spring rubbed against a metal ball and generated electricity in which, powered the magnets. We realized the magnets would shift along with the earth.
3) Drones Survival Delivery; For this we thought what was one of the worst things that has happened to a large portion of the country? One of the most referred to was the Pandemic of 1924. During this horrible event people could go down the block to get groceries and never come back. So how would we do this because the virus was transferred by physical contact with another person. Trucks, boats and trains would not work and airplanes were too big.
Drones with a bucket to hold emergency supplies such as; Water, Food, First Aid, Pet Care, etc. It would be able to travel in a pandemic/epidemic. We would use the Parrot AR drone. Why: because it is one of the strongest and most durable Drones out there. The Red Cross, Police, and Survival Assistance would control the drone by remote; But this could be a household item that you could fly to the necessity station and get food, water, blankets etc.
Each idea was great and we knew we could make each one work, but we looked at the floods that happened this summer and we came up with a road.
Flood Proof Road; We were interested in the floods and we looked at the roads. The storm drains could only hold so much water but with our road, we could eliminate the storm drains completely. First there’s a layer of geotextile fabric, Then there’s a layer of gravel about 18” to 2 ft. On top we have 10” hexagon tiles that together form a honeycomb pattern; On the sides we have geoweb to hold it all in. The road is pervious so the water will go right through, the gravel layer filtering it as it goes back into the earth. It also prevents Thermal, Reflective, and Fatigue Cracking.
Then we started our presentation, We looked at Roman Roads as part of our research and for our presentation we decided to do the Roman God News Network a.k.a. TRGNN.
We named our characters after the greek gods because they’re more well known. But we are actually roman gods.Well this is signing off for now!!
-The Flaming Robo Duckies
