I recently stumbled across a student-led engineering project at Cornell -- Cornell MineSweeper -- that supports a very noble cause. The project has already earned accolades from Nobel Peace Prize winners as well as numerous campus prizes. We expect to hear even bigger things coming from the organization in the future, and it will be interesting to see if they team up with any International Relations majors to focus on marketing and deploying the project. Coincidentally, this isn't the first time that minesweeping has been associated with Cornell. Last year, a sketch comedy group, Elephant Larry, out of New York City, made a splash with a trailer for a fictitious movie - Minesweeper: The Movie. The Cornell MineSweeper Project is a student-initiated effort to design and fabricate a low-cost, autonomous robotic vehicle to accurately detect landmines and facilitate their clearance. Cornell Minesweeper utilizes technologies in the areas of Machine Vision, Artificial Intelligence, Mechanical Design, and Landmine Detection. Our goal is to construct a robot that will become central to humanitarian demining missions. The robot will perform, with high efficiency and safety, the hazardous task of identifying the exact location of mines without risking human lives. This capability will benefit commercial, military, government and community interests across regions facing landmine infestation challenges.
Now, you may be wondering what this amusing sketch has anything to do with Cornell:
The five young men of Elephant Larry all met at Cornell University as members of the sketch comedy group, The Skits-O-Phrenics. Alex and Stefan graduated in 1999, moving to New York City shortly afterwards. Four years later, Jeff, Chris, and Geoff did the same, and in the summer of 2002, Elephant Larry was born.
Cornell University: Minesweeping on both the Engineering Quad and the Arts Quad.