Driveable Couch

Back in Spring 2018, me and my good friend Alex Goldstein (Goldie) were recipients of the HMC Shanahan Project Fund, a Harvey Mudd College student research grant. This grant is awarded by Harvey Mudd College to students with a creative/useful/fun project idea. Since I was a freshman, I had always wanted to build a remote controlled couch that I could sit on and drive up and down the college’s quad on a sunny California day. My senior year, I finally got the conviction (and funding!) to make that freshman dream happen!

Our couch used two powerful DC motors that could easily carry 2 ~ 3 people around HMC’s campus. We opted for differential steering since it was the easiest to implement with our RC remote. We placed a Bluetooth speaker in one the arm-rests, and slapped some cheap LED lights underneath! It was a great capstone project (in addition to my actual undergraduate thesis that is)! Special shout out to professor Dodds who was our advisor on the project. As well as professor Breznay who took the inaugural test drive.

Here we are on presentation day giving a brief demo! Sorry for the sound, we did apply WD-40 after this .