Senior thesis combined passions for softball and engineering- Harvard Gazette

"The mechanical engineering concentrator and softball outfielder's senior thesis project is an autonomous robot that can detect and collect softballs in the outfield after hitting drills. "What stood out to me most was that the project was directly connected to her passion for her sport, and she was very motivated to use her engineering background to address a real-world problem," said Professor Seymur Hasanov, Ayala's thesis project adviser."

"Shagging balls may seem mundane, but it is time-consuming, and Ayala '26 had little to spare. When she wasn't running drills with her Crimson teammates on Soldiers Field, she was either in the lab, hip-deep in engineering homework, or doing coursework for Army ROTC. The little discretionary time she had left was taken up by meetings for Harvard Athlete Ally or giving tours at the Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences."

""I built a robot that can shag balls, almost like a Roomba, out in the outfield during practice," she said. "To be able to combine both of my worlds is truly special." Ayala began work on her project in the fall, employing machine learning to train her SoftBot, using hundreds of photographs, to recognize softballs."

A senior thesis project created an autonomous outfield robot that detects and collects softballs after hitting drills. The project was motivated by the time demands of shagging balls and the creator’s need to balance athletics, engineering coursework, and ROTC responsibilities. The robot was built to function similarly to a Roomba, operating during practice in the outfield. Work began in the fall with machine learning training for SoftBot using hundreds of photographs to recognize softballs. Systems were later combined to produce a working autonomous solution for real-world practice needs.

Read at Harvard Gazette