Students showcased their engineering skills Tuesday afternoon.
For the 21st time, UF engineering students from the Integrated Product and Process Design program presented their research findings to students, UF staff and a variety of business sponsors in the Reitz Union. The program gives students the opportunity to work on real-world industry problems by partnering with companies, who created innovative research projects for the students.
This year, about 114 students from 19 teams showed off their creativity and presented projects ranging from chest implants that rehabilitate tremors to transmitting information through earth-to-satellite communication.
Integrated Product and Process Design is a yearlong capstone course for UF engineering seniors, and it allows students to get hands-on engineering experience, said R. Keith Stanfill, the program’s director.
Each team is assigned projects by sponsors and its job is to come up with innovations and execute them. Most teams were given about $2,000 from sponsors to create their projects, he said.
Stanfill said companies participate because they get to do research, help expand engineering education programs and recruit students for jobs.
“Everybody wins,” Stanfill said.
SpOtr
Three robots are better than one.
Instead of spending money on creating one multisensory robot, which would be able to detect temperature, shapes and colors, a team of UF students thought it would be less expensive to distribute the sensors among three robots. That way, if one gets lost the robot can easily be replaced.
SpOtr, a team of 10 UF students, are working on improving the line of sight and limited distance of the three robots they have developed, said Zach Goins, a UF finance and computer science senior.
Each robot has a specific sensor that relies on the other robots to help it communicate, the 22-year-old said.
“The project is for military research and recovery, which can range from finding people to finding bombs underground to save lives,” Goins said.
Cell Seeker
Aishwarya Vijayan’s stepfather died from cancer, and she wants to help others with the disease.
“There’s a personal aspect to it,” the UF biology and chemical engineering senior said.
With her team, Cell Seeker, the 21-year-old helped conduct research for its sponsor, Morphogensis. They worked with a system that takes a cancer patient’s blood, filters it through a column and pulls out circulating tumor cells.
By doing this, scientists and researchers can characterize the cells and create a personalized cancer treatment rather than attacking the whole body with chemotherapy, Vijayan said.
Cell Seeker’s work will end up belonging to its sponsor at the end of the year, she said.
“This semester was about getting all the technical stuff together, but next semester is going to be actually seeing our product working,” Vijayan said. “So we’re really excited about that.”
