Basketball Shooting Robot

The project calls for a multi-disciplined engineering team to build a basketball shooting robot that competes against Arizona basketball players at the culmination event of Engineering Design Day. The rules and requirements are simple: design and build a mechanism to shoot basketballs from the free-throw line; three warm-up shots are allowed, followed by a best-of-ten shootout against Shawn Elliot, Mike Bibby or other current Arizona sharpshooter like Kriisa Kerr.

The team would consist of engineering disciplines such as mechanical, controls, systems, engineering physics, electrical, computer, software and potentially bioengineering students. The team would be coached by a mix of seasoned and early career engineers from Raytheon, with a regular cadence of meetings to keep the team focused on goals. This project will require most of the engineering elements used in application of real-world engineering discipline: understand the problem, determine requirements, conduct trade studies to balance the design architecture, use elements of engineering design, as well as balance design complexity versus cost and schedule. Having a multi-disciplined team is key to making this project serve as a real-world engineering experience. Design, build, test and calibration would be key functional aspects of the development. A regular cadence to meet with Raytheon coaches, a mix of seasoned and early career engineers, is critical.