Agawam HS (839) and PotHole Detector Robot

[David Kelso]

Nice going Agawam. Even if the TV reporter did not say "FIRST Robotics", as soon as we saw the joysticks, we knew it was you!. Great project.

[Elgin Clock]

I had to resurrect this thread because I just saw on ABC World News that Chicago is dealing with one of the worst pothole seasons in their history.

They have a crew of about 20 people that are filling 200 potholes a day at least!

Any chance of sending this technology to the good folks of Chicago to help out this year?

I haven't heard anything about this since it was mentioned way back when here on CD in 2004.

4 years have gone by since then.
Was the project abandoned, or has it moved from the prototype stages already??

[Rosiebotboss]

Well, Elgin, it's a long story. But the short version is we didn't document all of our research and engineering work at the time of development. Consequently, even though we got a "patent pending" we did not follow up with the real application, for a lot of reasons. # 1 reason was that we would never had been able to defend it against infringement because of the lack of documentation.

On the good side, John and I have spoken at Lemelson workshops since our project and stressed the fact that teams needed to document, document, document. I know of at least one that took our story to heart, Team 357, Royal Jester. Their famous Jester Drive is the basis for their InvenTeam project of adapting it to a wheel chair. The last time I spoke to Joe Troy they were persuing going to market.

Road Iron, however is dormant.