Miranda Pederson/Daily News Western Kentucky University seniors Anthony Cole (left), of Ekron, and Joseph Cox (center), of Brandenburg, present their robot, which can water plants throughout a home, Wednesday during a robotics demonstration at Snell Hall.

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Go ahead and call your neighbors. They won’t need to water your plants anymore.

That’s because at say, 5 p.m., a robot built by a duo of Western Kentucky University students will know it’s time to hydrate the hydrangeas and will independently roll its R2D2-looking shell around the house extinguishing thirst.

Students in Art Shindhelm’s artificial intelligence class were given a $10,000 blank robot canvas and have spent the entire semester programming it to complete creative functions. On Wednesday afternoon, the students brought the ’bots to class to showcase some of the creative tasks and maneuvers they “taught” the robots to perform.

For Brandenburg senior Joseph Cox and his partner, Anthony Cole, a senior from Ekron, that meant spending more than 500 man hours to construct a does-it-itself watering can.

Cox said he wanted to solve a common household problem and decided to use the skills he’d developed from watching his father work in construction.

So from the confines of his dorm room, he used a saw and hammer to construct a lifesaver-sized PVC ring full of water to strap to the back of the robot with a wooden backpack-like stand. The team wired a hose through the 4-foot-tall rolling dome and connected it to a 12-inch dowel rod capped with a water tap.

After months of developing a mapping program of a hypothetical home floor plan, the team pushed a button on a laptop Wednesday and watched its “baby” go to work.

Like a scene from “The Jetsons,” the robot rolled forward, made a 90-degree turn and located the garbage can “plant” with the sensors just above its wheels and belly area.

“Watering plants,” the robot said in a mechanical voice, as a stream of water began flowing into the small black can.

As the device continued cornering turns and watering the rest of the imaginary domain’s daisies, Cox said the team also programmed the robot to ensure it waters only plants using a sonar sound reflective system similar to what is used by submarines to identify items in its path.

“It’s an artificial intelligence system in that it won’t water things that are not plants,” Cox said. “That way you won’t come home and see your desktop completely watered.”

Shindhelm said he asked the students at the beginning of the semester to come up with three ideas for the 14 Smart Robots, which arrived at the university in August through a portion of a $1.4 million federal grant for the school’s technology programs. He said he was more than impressed with what the students developed for the robots, which were actually constructed in Bowling Green by the Smart Robots Massachusetts-based company.

“I thought they were excellent,” Shindhelm said. “They surpassed anything I expected. And one of the main things is, Murphy didn’t show up today. That is, with Murphy’s law, if something can go wrong it will, but he didn’t show up and everything” went well.

Shindhelm said he thinks having a $10,000 robot to work with inspired the students to put a lot of effort into their projects.

One student programmed two robots to talk to each other using voice recognition, so that one could receive commands and “follow the leader.” In another class, which showed its work Monday, Shindhelm said a robot received commands to tell a joke or do a dance before the plastic started rolling to the “Hokey Pokey” to “turn itself around.”

Doug Hunnewell and Dex Wood, both seniors from Bowling Green, created an iPhone application that would allow a user to control their robot’s movements from anywhere in the world. They even equipped the plastic man with a camera to allow “first-person perspective” and installed a camera in the room so that the user had dual perspective of the robot’s functions.

During their presentation, Hunnewell said the robot can be enhanced to recognize items, such as a soccer ball, and could even be taught to play the game with other robots as they roll around bumping the black-and-white ball.

The local seniors said they spent several hours three nights a week working in the lab to perfect the program and saw a lot of real-life applications for which it could be used. Hunnewell said the program could allow the robot to search a building during a scenario such as a bomb threat, when it could be too risky to send in a human.

Wood said he saw endless possibilities with the robots as the class presented its projects, especially if the different projects were combined.

“If you combined projects, you could have a visual (sensing robot) like ours with a strong arm that can move things,” he said.

The students said they have often built software programs during their time in the computer science department, but generally show them to professors and forget about them. They said this is the first time they have been able to work with hardware to create real-life applications that are fun to watch.

“Just working so hard to build it and then watching it work and seeing it move, it’s a rush,” Wood said.

Joe Bosworth, president and CEO of Smart Robots Inc., attended the class with a video camera to witness what his creations were trained to do. He said he was thrilled to see the students had the “stick-to-it” attitude and problem-solving skills necessary to overcome some of the obstacles and challenges they faced during the projects.

“They were very creative and worked very hard and it showed in the results, which is very gratifying to see,” he said.

Bosworth said the whole class came together and helped one another on their projects, teamwork which was reflected in the success of the endeavors.

“It’s what I envisioned and it’s one thing you wish for but you don’t know if you will get it or not,” he said of the cooperation. “They have created a body of knowledge for the next group to come in and build on so instead of re-inventing the wheel, they can move forward. And that doesn’t happen enough in robotics.”

After seeing all the plants receive water from his robot, Cox said he was glad the project was over and elated it had gone successfully.

“I’m so happy for it. This has been a project that we didn’t exactly get in over our heads, but we definitely got in it,” he said.