Bear Feeding Catapult
In my freshman year of college, I took my first of many engineering design courses. My team of 5 chose to work with the Houston Zoo, who tasked us with building a feeder for their bear exhibit. Over the course of one semester, we developed a low level prototype as a proof of concept for our solution to their problem. The zoo liked the catapult idea so much that they still use it to feed meatballs to their large cats.
Client
Houston Zoo
Year
2019
Background Context
In 2019, the Houston zoo had two black bears rescued from California, Willow and Belle. Until recently, the zoo had been using an automatic deer feeder to launch pellets around the enclosure and give the bears a little bit of stimulation when looking for them. Unfortunately, the feeder was reaching the end of its lifespan, so they wanted to see what we could come up with.
Ideation
In our brainstorming, we had 93 partial solutions. We sorted the ideas into blocks, and using a morph chart, combined them into full solutions.
Once we had over 20 full solutions, we used screening and scoring matrices to narrow down our decision. These were our criteria:
Engaging to bears
Frequency to refill
Time to clean
Blends with exhibit
Feasibility
Based on these, we were able to confidently choose our final solution, an automated catapult to launch the food to different areas of the exhibit.
Design Concept
A automated catapult enables the zoo to distribute food throughout the exhibit, giving the bears increased engagement with their environment without increasing the amount of work done by the zookeepers.
Prototyping & Experimentation
