Robotics demo day: five projects from the autumn cohort

The autumn cohort's demo day filled the lab with families, partners, and five projects that had survived six weeks of iteration, failure, and last-minute rewiring. Every team presented live — no slides allowed until the machine had moved.

The crowd favourite was a line-following warehouse cart that navigated a taped course carrying a crate of (unbroken) eggs, complete with an emergency stop the audience was invited to test. The quietest table held the proudest build: a working braille embosser prototype, assembled from salvaged printer parts, that produced its first readable page about an hour before the doors opened.

Also on show: a self-balancing two-wheel platform, a soil-monitoring node with a week of battery life, and a robotic arm that sorts components by colour — slightly slower than a human, as its team cheerfully admitted, but it never complains.

Demo day is where our participants stop being students for an afternoon and become exhibitors. Watching them explain their own debugging decisions to a visiting engineer is the best assessment we know how to run.