Robotic autonomy is the direction of the future. Our VELMA robot can efficiently search an unknown environment and successfully find a color coded target object. With a Raspberry Pi as the computing unit, and Robot Operating System (ROS) serving as the framework, our software creates a map of the vehicle’s surroundings and avoids obstacles by leveraging simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM) software combined with LiDAR data. Additionally, we fuse LiDAR scans with odometry data from the speed controller for improved localization.

In this project, students laid the foundation for passive shoes that altered friction and shape, which led further refinements, a pilot study, and a published paper that eventually transformed into Cadense.

Heeluxe is a lead shoe testing company that is determined to help footwear companies make better shoes. This year, Heeluxe is tackling the problem of simulating shoes’ performance in an ice environment. The capstone team is helping the company to build such testing enclosures that include an ice surface and cold environment. The ice surface is an ice sheet that can be made repeatedly and quickly in a freezer from an custom engineered ice mold that is designed to provide a smooth and strong surface. The Igloo structure is designed to have an internal temperature no higher than four Celcius.

Emperor is a quad-copter drone-based oceanographic instrument used to measure conductivity, temperature, and depth in the upper coastal ocean (CTD). These measurements are essential for oceanographic research, where the current measurement methods such as the shipboard sampling method produces accurate and reliable results, at the cost of being very expensive and time-consuming.

CubeSats is the number one way for innovation in space research. This can be attributed to their significantly lower costs relative to conventional satellites and greater accessibility to space via a rideshare program. The main constraint, however, is the low average power generation due to their small size, meaning they have limited surface area on their external walls for solar cell assembly. Our solution aims to tackle that problem by introducing an origami-inspired solar deployment method which utilizes shape memory alloys as actuators.