Honda announces iDream Challenge Winners

10:53 pm | Carnegie Mellon University, Duke University, Engineering, Georgia Institute of Technology, University of Houston | No comment

Honda, a well-known automobile manufacturer from Japan that has been operating in the U.S. since the year 1959 has announced the winners of the first iDream Student Challenge at the 2010 ‘Honda Initiation Grant’ Technical Horizon Symposium held in Columbus, Ohio.

In this year’s competition that included 19 teams of Ohio State science and engineering students, fifteen electrical and computer engineering students, and their three ECE faculty mentors, were among the winning teams in Honda’s first iDream Student Challenge whose projects offered creative engineering solutions and innovative technologies in one of three categories: electronics, mobility and materials.

A total of $60,000 was awarded to the top three teams in each category as well as to the viewer’s choice winner, a team chosen via online voting.

This year’s winners are:

– Electronics, First Place: No Abandonment, Baby Wireless Sensor
– Mobility, First Place: Solar Solutions, Solar Thermal Electric Car Charging Station
– Materials, First Place: Smaller Memories to Remember, Oxide Nanowires for Next Generation Solid State Memory Devices
– Viewer’s Choice: OSU Gait Trainer Team, Gait Trainer for Children with Cerebral Palsy

This year’s HIG recipients, who were each awarded a grant of $50,000, are:

– Andrea Thomaz, Georgia Institute of Technology, Socially Guided Machine Learning for Humanoid Robots
– Alan Black, Carnegie Mellon University, Conversational Speech Synthesis
– Michael Harold, University of Houston, Enhancing Liquid Fuel Yield During Algae Pyrolysis in Structured Catalytic Reactors
– Donald Bliss, Duke University, Light and Flexible Multi-Element Structures that Resist Sound and Vibration Transmission
– Yaser Sheikh, Carnegie Mellon University, Dynamic Visual SLAM: Reconstructing Dynamic Environments from Mobile Cameras

Wichita SU Students win Excellence in Aviation

12:36 am | Engineering, Wichita State University | No comment

The “Excellence in Aviation Research” award was given to the three students for their impressive engineering projects by the NIAR (National Institute of Aviation Research) at Wichita State University.

The first place award and $250 prize went to the project “TB24 Design, Validate and Compete Aircraft” and the team of Brian Kollar, Tyler Higgs, Mark Holliday, Austin Reed and Nick Steinbrink for their electric-powered remote-controlled aircraft.

Second place was awarded to Tawny Blumenshine, Jordan Jensen, Ryan Longwell and Grant Rudd, for a project entitled “Team Strikeout: Pitching a baseball with different positions.”

Third place went to the team of Jordan Zerr, Brendan Kelly, Aaron Werhan and Shuet-Ming Wong for their design of a blended wing body, radio-controlled aircraft.

The competition was part of the recent open house at WSU’s College of Engineering.

UA Students Create Mars Flying Blanket

6:34 pm | Engineering, University of Arizona | No comment

The Mars Lander Camera

A team of students were challenged by NASA and the UA (University of Arizona) to create an improved camera for space missions. NASA’s RISA (Remote Image System Acquisition), wants to create an imaging system that is versatile and can be used for many applications that would lessen the capacity of the necessary cargo space. The final design must have wireless power and communications. It should be small, light, and energy efficient but tough as well unlike the present space cameras that are considered to be disposable because of the extremes found in the space.

Flying Blanket

As for the flying blanket, Raytheon is sponsoring a project to design it. This project needs the students to design a firing tube that shoots a folded blanket that will open up in mid-air before wrapping around its target. Since it could involve human as the target, the purpose of this project is to create a harmless way of restraining and making a person to stop. The final design consists of a collapsible metal exoskeleton that spreads out like a giant bat wing and then wraps around the target on impact.

MSU students in NASA Lunar competition

11:51 pm | Engineering, Montana State University | No comment

An engineering student of MSU (Montana State University) will have to maneuver the 120-pound robot called “Montana MULE” through a giant sandbox, avoiding craters and rocks, and then removing as much simulated moon dirt as possible within 15 minutes in a competition sponsored by NASA.

Regolith is the simulated dirt where the MSU students tested their robot in a May snowstorm. If MSU wins NASA’s first Lunar Regolith Excavator Student Competition, the university team will receive a cash prize of $5,000 plus a chance to watch the launch at the Kennedy Space Center.

The robot stands about 5 feet tall and is mostly recycled aluminum. It rolls on four wheels and incorporates several systems instead of just one. Students operated on it by using wireless technology and the controls for an XBox 360 computer game. The wireless technology talks to the robot’s electronics system that turns the motor on and off. The motor turns a chain that moves small buckets below the level of the wheels. The buckets, moving as though they were the seats on a Ferris wheel, scoop the soil and dump it into the robot’s hopper.

The eight team members are: Christopher Ching of Belgrade, Ben Hogenson and Phillip Karls from Billings, Steve Pemble of Colstrip, Craig Harne of Cut Bank, Paul Dallapiazza from Florence, Jennifer Hane of Fort Shaw and John Ritter of Idaho Falls, Idaho.

Youngest Student to Win the Biotalent Contest

9:31 pm | Biology, Engineering | No comment

Rui Song, 14, a 9th grader Saskatoon student who won the $5,000 1st prize in The Sanofi-Aventis BioTalent Challenge, loves studying pathogens that led her to decipher a method of finding, whether a dangerous fungus that destroys the Lentil crop is present in the crop or not.

The research can help in preventing damage to the Lentil crop (which is a major agricultural export item) by early detection of fungus in the crops. Rui Song explains that the fungus that is causing the infection can decrease the yield of the Lentil crop by half and also reduce the seed quality by 10%. She has verified 50 out of the 2000 potential genetic markers in the field and has therefore given a breakthrough start for more thorough research by agriculture specialists. If the milder fungus was early detected by the farmers as the one who attacks their crops, it would save them time, money and effort as they could do without spraying a fungicide, said one of the judges.

UM Low-cost Wheelchairs Headed to Africa

9:18 pm | Engineering, Health, University of Maine | No comment

Five students of Mechanical Engineering Technology in the University of Maine together with their senior-year projects with the supervision of professor Herb Crosby presented Wednesday morning their design for the Landmine Victim Mobility Vehicle Project.

The winning team which is composed of seniors Jacob Cookson, Levi Guimond, Jesse Miller, Matthew Mingo and Sean Theriault, created a prototype for a hand-powered tricycle wheelchair meant for adults who have been the victims of land mines in Mozambique. They developed a push-pull system of powering its tricycle. Their design was based on an Irish Mail (Cart) that uses a push-pull lever to drive a main gear, which then drives the axle and propels the gear forward. They also had one of the least expensive prototypes. The majority of the teams went over the suggested cost of $200 in wholesale materials, and the winning team’s design costs $349.96 and was the only one that came in closer to $200. It was also one of the lighter prototypes, coming in at 72 pounds.

WPI students showcase Moonracker 2.0 Robot

10:36 am | Engineering, Worcester Polytechnic Institute | No comment

The Boston Block Party at the Museum of Science was a successful event in celebration of the National Robotics Week.

The prize winning Moonraker 2.0 robot of the students from Worcester Polytechnic Institute (WPI) gave a remarkable impression that will interest anyone who sees it. Moonraker 2.0 which won the $500,000 NASA Regolith Challenge in October 2009 was created by Paul’s Robotics, which was led by robotics engineering major Paul Ventimiglia. NASA needed robots to excavate at least 150 kilograms of simulated lunar soil within a 30-minute period, demonstrating a task that will be important for future lunar construction and processing projects.

An eye-catching robotic bug from the Harvard Microrobotics Lab. These tiny robots and spying devices are part of the craze nowadays. Engineers from Harvard have created these fly-size gizmos that indicate a generation of miniscule machines. Their movement was modeled from a real fly and weighs only 60 milligrams with a wingspan of three centimeters that one of these days can be used as spies, or for detecting harmful chemicals.

MIT’s Sixth Sense

9:14 pm | Engineering, Internet, MIT, Video | No comment

The Sixth Sense, a device that you can wear that allows new interactions between the real world and the world of data was invented by Pranav Mistry, 28, a PhD student in the Fluid Interfaces Group at MIT’s Media Lab. A graduate of IIT and had worked with Microsoft as a UX researcher before his studies at MIT, Pranav Mistry is obsessed about integrating the digital informational experience with our real-world interactions.

A wearable gestural interface that augments the physical world around us with digital information, Sixth Sense allows us to use natural hand gestures to interact with information by just using a camera and a tiny projector mounted in a pendant that can be worn by the user. All it needs is a natural hand gestures, arm movements, or your interaction with the object itself.

Sixth Sense has been awarded 2009 Invention Award by Popular Science. Pranav also won Young Innovator Award TR35 byTechnology Review. In 2010, he was named to Creativity Magazine’s Creativity 50. Mistry has been called “one of the two or three, best inventors in the world right now” by Chris Anderson.

MIT student develops wound-healing device

12:46 am | Engineering, MIT | No comment

Danielle Zurovcik, an MIT graduate student was one of the team who had developed a cheap and portable version of the negative-pressure devices that is now being used to speed wound healing in hospitals.

After the great earthquake that happened in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, a wound-care team from Brigham and Women’s hospital in Boston decided to go to the devastated capital and offered help for patients suffering from the large open wounds that accompanied amputations, crushed limbs, and other injuries. As part of Zurovcik thesis research, she began a test using her cheap and portable version of the negative-pressure device. The negative-pressure therapy decreases the need to change wound dressings from one to three times per day to once every few days and provides a way to improve care for patients after the emergency phase of relief efforts.

The device that costs only $3 is human-powered that applies pressure via a simple bellows pump that weighs less than half a pound.

Yale spokeless bike student project

10:25 pm | Engineering, Yale | No comment

For their mechanical design class, a group of students from Yale chose to create a spokeless bike. They focused on the rear wheel thinking that if the back wheel worked, the front wheel follows since the work all goes to the back wheel. They used a standard 26-inch size to contol the back wheel so that a stock tire would fit. You would also see a belt drive in it which is usually used to replace a chain. The double-crank and double bottom bracket are its unique features. It was used for getting the gear right.

The bike is a single-speed. Both chaining has 53 teeth, and the cog has 13. The spokeless wheel suggests extra space that you can use to fit in a carrying basket or a motor to balance its load.

Zhaolander , a team member says that the only problem is the handling since the big rim supports make things top-heavy.