Robotic Arm Draws Swarthmore Logo

Katherine Bertaut '12, from Silver Spring, Md., and Ames Bielenberg '12, from Hudson, N.Y., used a robotic arm to produce a unique version of the College's logo. The two, lab partners in Professor of Engineering Erik Cheever's Engineering Methodology course, made improvements to the existing arm and wrote controlling software for it. "We used Processing to write a friendly GUI that allows the user to either draw with the mouse or import SVG path data from a file," Ames says. "The software then traces the paths and sends the angles to the servos of the robotic arm." Ames made a time-lapse video of the arm, since the actual drawing took a little over a half hour to complete.