Icon viewers may not think of J.D. Yoder of Bluffton as a football coach - or one whose team has already defeated Notre Dame - but both statements are true.

Yoder, professor and chair of mechanical engineering at Ohio Northern University, Ada, "coaches" students from ONU's T.J. Smull College of Engineering. 

The students have created a team of robotic football players to compete in the annual University of Notre Dame robotic football competition on Friday, April 10, at 7 p.m. in the ONUKing Horn Sports Center. The event is free and open to the public.

The Polar Bears, under Yoder's coaching, defeated the University of Notre Dame, 29-7, last year in South Bend, and ONU snared the Brian Hederman Memorial Robotic Football Trophy for the second consecutive season. The award is named after Hederman, a Notre Dame student who suffered an untimely death after his freshman year in 1995. A drawing he left behind inspired the trophy and the competition itself.

A mix of students from ONU’s Polar Robotics Club and from an engineering capstone team manufactured multiple robotic players (quarterbacks, centers, linemen, running backs, wide receivers and a kicker) for the annual gridiron showdown.

These players compete in an eight-on-eight, modified-rules football game that tests the skills of each robot specific to its 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.

In addition to Yoder's coaching, the students are also advised by Heath LeBlanc, assistant professor of electrical engineering. Yoder worked with a Notre Dame faculty members Michael Stanisic and James Schmiedeler to coordinate the project.

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.