It's ONU versus Notre Dame in football - and the Polar Bears are coached by a Bluffton resident.

Sort of.

Ohio Northern University engineering students under the direction of Bluffton resident, J.D. Yoder, professor and chair of mechanical engineering, along with Sami Khorbotly, assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering, have created a team of robotic football players.

The players will compete in the fifth annual University of Notre Dame robotic football competition on Saturday, April 6, at 7 p.m. in the ONU King Horn Sports Center. The event is free and open to the public. 

Yoder worked with a Notre Dame faculty member, Dr. Michael Stanisic, to coordinate the project.

As part of their senior capstone project during the 2012-13 academic year, a team of ONU students manufactured 12 robotic players (quarterbacks, centers, linemen, running backs, wide receivers and a kicker) with funding from the University of Notre Dame.

These players will compete in an eight-on-eight, modified-rules football game, which tests the skills of each robot specific to their position, against robots built by Notre Dame students.

Equipped with sensors that flash different colors when the mechatronic players are hit, tackled or injured, the robots are roughly the size of desktop printers. The game itself consists of two 15-minute halves and a 10-minute halftime.

The teams will compete for the Brian Hederman Memorial Robotic Competition Award. Hederman was a Notre Dame student who suffered an untimely death after his freshman year in 1995. A drawing he left behind inspired the award plaque and the competition itself. Notre Dame was victorious in last year’s game.

Yoder said that despite the air of a sporting event, the game is actually a display of the accumulated knowledge of sophisticated engineering concepts. The technical challenges of designing and building the robot football players deepens student understanding of and ability to implement engineering principles.

The participants will take the skills they acquire during the project and use them in their careers as engineers, applying the same principles to develop, among other things, intelligent prostheses, biomedical devices and electromechanical systems in general.