Capstone Students Develop Grasshopper Catcher

The University of Arizona's Department of Entomology is sponsoring an Interdisciplinary Capstone project for engineering students to develop a grasshopper catching device. This is the third year entomology professor Goggy Davidowitz has sponsored the project. For one, grasshoppers are pests, and organic farmers who limit their use of pesticides could benefit from a way to remove them from crops. But in addition, Davidowitz envisions a future in which grasshoppers and other insects become a major source of protein for humans.

This year’s team has several advantages. Not only are they building on the progress made by the two previous teams, but they’re also using the Agile Method, a technique first introduced to the Interdisciplinary Capstone program in 2019, which is increasingly common in software companies. In Agile process, engineers use customer input to focus on a specific element of a project that will bring the most value to the customer, and then design, validate and implement that piece before moving onto the next one. 

“It was definitely a scramble to start with,” said mechanical engineering student Jake Vartanian. “We had two weeks to do CAD drawings and a design of our cart, and the following two weeks were in the shop."

While they still have improvements to make to the device – including fine-tuning the turning mechanism – they currently have a working version of what their client asked for, known in Agile as the minimum viable product.