Faculty Advisor: Dr. Hoo Kim

BADGER is an autonomous robot designed for installation on golf courses to autonomously chase Canadian Geese away. This year’s team builds upon the work of three previous years’ work on the project. The focus is primarily improving GPS path following and computer vision.

Faculty Advisor: Dr. Yunus Salami

Picture a large dam used for flood control and irrigation. The flood control objective requires its reservoir to temporarily hold then safely release water that could otherwise inundate residential and agricultural areas, while the irrigation objective provides cost savings. The LETU retention pond serves a similar purpose for campus. Previous teams designed hydraulic structures and performed hydrologic analyses to evaluate sustainability of the system, overland drainage rates, as well as patterns and effect of reservoir inflow.

This year, improvements will be made in hydrologic analyses, hydraulic design, hardware for electronic monitoring sensors, and the computer codes that run them so that reservoir accumulation and potential overland inundation can both be accurately estimated and modeled.

This project will enable students to – despite the smaller spatial scale – more efficiently perform the same design and mitigation decisions that engineers must make in large-scale systems like dams. This project brings together practical applications of three upper-level civil engineering courses (Hydraulic Analysis, Hydraulic Design, and Hydrology).

Faculty Advisor: Dr. Ezequiel Pessoa

The microFriction Stir Welding (µFSW) senior design team, overseen by Dr. Pessoa aims to develop a corner joint for FSW for thin (1.5 to 3 mm) 6061 aluminum plates through a nine-month Senior Design project utilizing a Kielhorn lab equipment and performing literature review, concepting and building welding joints, fixtures and FSW tools, running experiments and characterizing the welded joints.

Faculty Advisor: Dr. Joonwan Kim

LEVIS team aims to design and fabricate a portable device for the telehealth market that measures respiratory rate non-invasively using facial recognition and thermal imaging. Additionally, the LEVIS team is creating a cellular app to display the breathing rate measurement and publishing a research conference paper. The medical device builds on the prototypes developed in the previous years by Breathe and LEVI to improve the user interface, portability, and measurement accuracy.

Faculty Advisor: Dr. Ko Sasaki

LETREP23 aims to design and develop a medical-grade rehabilitation device for individuals with motor impairment due to neurological disorders (e.g., stroke and spinal-cord injured patients). The device uses operant conditioning of the stretch reflex in the soleus muscle to reduce muscle spasticity. This is applying the concept of neuroplasticity to reduce the foot drop commonly seen in neurologically impaired patients.  We are also collaborating with a team in the business department to develop a business model for the device, along with a team from the computer science department to create a video-game like interface to improve user engagement during the rehabilitation process.

Faculty Advisor: Dr. Chad File

The LUNAR team is competing in the Argonia Cup Collegiate Rocketry Competition, in which the challenge is to design and build a high-powered rocket and also a payload vehicle to be ejected from the rocket to deliver a payload to a designated target on the ground. The rocket must be a two-stage design (have two individual motors that fire sequentially), reach a minimum altitude of 9,000’ above ground level, and descend at a safe velocity. The payload vehicle is a quadcopter drone that must fit inside the rocket, withstand the forces of rocket flight, and be able to autonomously deliver a golf ball payload from wherever the rocket ejects it to the specified target— a journey of potentially multiple miles and 20 mph wind conditions! This project will need to consider such fields as structural and fluid mechanics, aerodynamics, rotor flight, and wireless communications in order to create a competitive rocket and payload system.

Faculty Advisor: Prof. Norman Reese

The Frontier Robotics team will design and build two 15 lb combat robots and a combat arena, host a regional competition, and compete in the national robotics league competition in Kansas City.  To enhance performance of the robots, a motor tester will be constructed and various motors will be tested for efficiency and stall characteristics.  Various polymeric materials and configurations will also be tested to ensure safe containment of robot fragments within the fifteen foot arena.

Faculty Advisor: Dr. Andrew Davis and Dr. Darryl Low

Machine learning and other mathematical modeling methods can be used to predict the performance of engineered systems including new applications in potable water treatment. The proposed research is to predict operation and maintenance requirements of a rapid sand filter based on experimental measurements and mathematical modeling with machine learning.

Faculty Advisor: Dr. Gitogo Churu

Persons with physical disabilities often find it difficult to get in and out of vehicles. The main objective of this Senior Design Project is to design, build and test a device that can effectively help a person with a disability to get in and out of the vehicle safely and with ease. The device must be safe to operate and inexpensive to mass produce.

Faculty Advisor: Dr. Nathan Green

TFRS is a GPS-focused project supported by a generous donation from Coherent Technical Services, Inc. (www.goctsi.com). TFRS will develop a calibration module integrated with a high-performance triple-frequency GPS receiver. GPS operates at three unique frequencies that can experience non-uniform delay during the signal processing the introduce biases among the signals. By identifying the timing bias between the three GPS frequency bands positional accuracy can be improved down the millimeter. Our team works with RF and high-speed digital circuit design, circuit board manufacturing, signal processing and analysis, filter design, and VHDL synthesis.