HALIFAX, N.S. — As of September 2024, Dalhousie University can boast a combat robotics team among its many undergraduate student societies. The Dalhousie Combat Robotics Team (DCRT) will add Dalhousie to a growing number of Canadian universities with extracurricular robotics associations, such as the Universities of Toronto and Waterloo. But despite this exciting addition to our campus community, the leadership of the team has, to their surprise, encountered difficulty in generating interest among students.
Brit Higgins, a second year engineering student and founding member of the DCRT, spoke to the Mackerel: “We understand that students are really busy. Heck, I’m in class fourteen hours a day five days a week; I realize that people want to relax in their free time. So, we made posters that highlight the most exciting parts of combat robotics.”
The posters put up around campus were designed by DCRT member and third year engineering student Dev Novik, and feature slogans such as “from designing dual-axis compliant mechanisms with custom flexure hinges, to conducting finite element analysis on the end-effector assembly, we have fun in combat robotics.”
Novik told the Mackerel, “My favourite one says ‘you don’t have to choose between modelling stiffness coefficients to maintain dynamic stability and adjusting the inertial properties of the flywheel, we do it all,’ since my roommate is really passionate about calculating stiffness parameters, and I prefer tweaking the inertia. We’re really scratching our heads about why we haven’t generated more interest.”
Other members of the DCRT have mentioned doing more social media outreach, or having a pizza social, but it remains to be seen if they will pursue any different styles of recruitment.
By Grace Brown