Electrical Engineering Student Helps Design and Build Chimpanzee Enrichment Devices
Undergraduate Taylor Jones spent the summer working on a project he probably never anticipated when he became an Electrical Engineering student: designing the building the motors and switches for enrichment devices for the chimpanzees at Oakland Zoo (Figure 1). The project’s primary investigator, Nicole Cornelius (MS candidate in Biology), aims to understand how enrichment complexity affects the behavior of highly intelligent animals living in captivity. For the first phase of the project, Taylor programmed an Arduino board to run a former vending machine motor to drop rewards into a puzzle feeder at pre-determined times. Chimps then move the reward through the device to obtain it (Figure 2). For the second phase, Taylor designed and built an LED switch that allows the chimpanzees to run the enrichment device themselves. When a chimp drops a block into the device, it passes by and disrupts the LED light, which triggers the motor to release a reward. Taylor’s contribution to this project was funded by a 2016-2017 RSCAP Mini-Grant, awarded to Dr. Karin E. Jaffe.