{"id":7293,"date":"2019-06-13T10:09:37","date_gmt":"2019-06-13T14:09:37","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/ww2.georgiasouthern.edu\/news\/magazine\/?p=7293"},"modified":"2023-02-15T10:48:48","modified_gmt":"2023-02-15T15:48:48","slug":"creating-opportunity","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/ww2.georgiasouthern.edu\/news\/magazine\/2019\/06\/13\/creating-opportunity\/","title":{"rendered":"Creating \u2018opportunity\u2019 – Georgia Southern Engineering Students Design Animatronic Eagle"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
\"\"<\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n

When most people see him, they stop at least a few feet away.\nThe pause allows them to consider\nhow close they should get.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

His eyes open and his head turns, scanning the room as if he\u2019s looking for prey. His body stoops and rises, and his wings open and close. At times, he\u2019s looking directly at you, and you sense he might be dangerous. Suddenly, his beak opens and he…speaks?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cWe\u2019re Georgia Southern! Our colors are blue\nand white\u2026\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

His name is Opportunity, and he\u2019s an animatronic\nbald eagle created by\nengineering alumnus Eric Burns (\u201816), engineering graduate student\nConner Hughes, and several\nformer undergraduate student team members. The project was part\nof their 2016 senior design course in mechanical engineering and was\nfunded by an engineering undergraduate research grant.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cWe set out to create an animatronic that\u2019s as lifelike as possible \u2014\nsomething that really captures\npeople\u2019s attention, something that you could mistake and\nlook at and think it was maybe even Freedom,\u201d said Hughes.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

At first glance, many people assume it is Freedom, Georgia Southern\u2019s bald eagle mascot. And while the finished product seems automagically assembled, building this complex animatronic eagle took a team of 15 students roughly six months of hard work to complete.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cYou know that when you\u2019ve seen an animatronic figure…you\u2019re not necessarily\nthinking about engineering,\u201d said\nBurns. \u201cYou\u2019re thinking about\nwhether or not you\u2019re entertained by that thing. But the engineering is being creative\nenough to make something that\u2019s completely fake \u2014 a whole\nrobot \u2014 look like it\u2019s real.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

To bring Opportunity to life, Burns managed three subteams \u2014 a controls team that worked on programming the eagle\u2019s movements, a mechanical team that built the underlying structure, and an electrical team that made sure it would power up.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Working from a very basic eagle AutoCAD model they found online, the team created the frame by water jet, and 3D-printed 28 unique components, and also had to assemble a few hundred nuts, bolts, bearings and servo motors that make up its inner structure. Once created, the team had to run stress tests on the frame and components to ensure they could move and hold the weight of the head, neck and wings.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

To bring the structure to life, Hughes had to program a microcontroller which would manipulate the motors controlling the skeleton. To mimic the movements of a real bald eagle, he found a YouTube video of two bald eagles interacting with a woman on her porch. He programmed each of the movements frame by frame, in milliseconds, with complex code.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cIt was very tedious,\u201d said Hughes. \u201cI think the first\nversion of the code that got everything moving and actually making noise was\nsomething like 1,200 lines long. And it took me 120 hours straight to get it\nall working.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In addition, Hughes says there were several 11th- and 12th-hour problems to overcome, including a minor fire hazard, which they avoided with the help of electrical engineering students. Through it all, however, Burns and Hughes learned more about real-world engineering projects than they ever could\u2019ve gotten from a lecture.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cYou know, people\ntalk about other schools\nhaving a better\ncurriculum. \u2026\u201d said Burns. \u201cBut the\ntruth of the matter is that everybody pretty much takes the same exact courses in order to get a degree\nin the state of Georgia. So it\u2019s your extracurriculars that make you\nstand out.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cSo if\nyou get involved in undergraduate research, which is one\nof the best things you can\nbe involved in, then\nyou\u2019re a step ahead of everybody when you walk across\nthe stage and get\nyour diploma.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Opportunity travels with the Department of Mechanical Engineering to admissions events and area\nschools to raise student\ninterest in science, technology,\nengineering and math\nfields. He makes different eagle sounds,\noccasionally makes Godzilla sounds, speaks\nalong with an old Georgia Southern football commercial, and commands\nimmediate attention wherever he goes.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Hughes is still working on the eagle as part of his\nmaster\u2019s studies. He says it\u2019s still hard work, but watching Opportunity in\naction is worth it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cI think the most rewarding thing about the bird is getting to see the kids interact with it,\u201d he said. \u201cActually getting to see the surprise on the kids\u2019 faces when they find out that it\u2019s an animatronic is absolutely priceless.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u2013 Doy\u00a0 Cave<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

When most people see him, they stop at least a few feet away. The pause allows them to consider how close they should get. His eyes open and his head turns, scanning the room as if he\u2019s looking for prey. His body stoops and rises, and his wings open and close. At times, he\u2019s looking […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":17,"featured_media":7294,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[59],"class_list":["post-7293","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-research","tag-spring-2019"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/ww2.georgiasouthern.edu\/news\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7293","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/ww2.georgiasouthern.edu\/news\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/ww2.georgiasouthern.edu\/news\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ww2.georgiasouthern.edu\/news\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/17"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ww2.georgiasouthern.edu\/news\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7293"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/ww2.georgiasouthern.edu\/news\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7293\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ww2.georgiasouthern.edu\/news\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/7294"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/ww2.georgiasouthern.edu\/news\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7293"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ww2.georgiasouthern.edu\/news\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7293"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ww2.georgiasouthern.edu\/news\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7293"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}