Taking teh sweat out of golf

In golf, to paraphrase jazz great Duke Ellington, it don't mean a thing if you ain't got that swing. So legions of devotees routinely spend hours at driving ranges practicing their strokes. Trouble is, all that bending over placing ball after ball on a tee can strain your back and hamper your driving ability.

To the rescue comes Li'l Golfing Buddy, a prototype robot designed by University of Florida senior Jonathan Gamoneda, who is majoring in electrical and computer engineering. The robot scuttles about on rubber wheels, has infrared senors to spot the tee, and uses a mechanical arm to place a ball on it. Gamoneda, 21, admits he first wanted the "Buddy" to hold a whole bucket of balls, but time and money forced a scaling back of plans. Still, he insists, "it's easier to load the Li'l Golfing Buddy than place a ball on a the tee." Response has been positive, so Gamoneda harbors hopes of improving the design-perhaps adding a voice activation application-and commercializing it. "It's still a work in progress," he says. Meanwhile, fellow Florida student and computer engineering major Kahlil Khan created RoboWoods, a shoebox-sized hot with infrared sensors and a putter head. The sensors pinpoint the ball and hole so that the putter head can sink the ball. Of course, RoboWoods would be illegal in a real game. But, says Khan, "you could use it to play a game of one-on-one, you versus RoboWoods, to see who is the better putter," thus making it a device to help duffers practice their putting. Which is also useful, given another golfing truism: The swing don't mean a thing if you can't putt.

Copyright American Society for Engineering Education Mar 2002
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