Senior Design Expo, April 25, previews a high-tech future

HOBOKEN , N.J. — The creativity and inventiveness of seniors at Stevens Institute of Technology will be on display during the 2007 Senior Design Expo, April 25. Projects in chemical engineering, biomedical engineering, computer engineering, civil, environmental and ocean engineering, business and technology, and robotics and embedded intelligent systems highlight this year’s Expo.

Approximately 60 team projects, many featuring leading-edge, interactive technologies, will be viewable on the Stevens campus at the Canavan Arena, located at the Charles V. Schaefer, Jr. Athletic Center, between 11:30 a.m.–2:30 p.m. , April 25. The presentation is open to the press and the public. For directions and parking information please call or e-mail the contact listed below.

As part of their degree fulfillment, teams of graduating seniors demonstrate projects they have jointly engineered, often involving elaborate mechanical and electronic devices, as well as virtual prototypes. In many cases the development process has been under way for well over a year. A number of the teams have attracted industry sponsorship to assist with development; and in some cases, the students have won commitments from those sponsors to adapt their projects for real-world industrial applications. Moreover, a variety of patents are derived each year from Senior Design Expo projects, as with the recently publicized Stevens Proof of Concept (SPOC), a hand-held device (and now company) designed by Stevens students in 2005 to locate the precise source of muscle pain, in collaboration with Dr. Norman Marcus of NYU Medical Center.

“Senior Design Expo is a festive event that celebrates the inventiveness, creativity and entrepreneurship of Stevens’ students,” said Provost & University VP George P. Korfiatis. “From new kinds of implants and prosthetics developed by biomedical and materials engineering teams, to advanced computer applications for the next wave of hand-held wireless consumer entertainment devices, to smart robots, this day provides a detailed look at the kinds of technologies these young scientists and engineers will be pursuing upon graduation from Stevens.”

Project highlights:

Intelligent Autonomous Search System: Embedded Systems Infrastructure

This team developed an expendable search drone to allow for safer identification of potential targets and hazards, providing a useful alternative for reconnaissance in hostile territory and unsafe terrain. To achieve this goal, the iASS: ESI Senior DesignGroup developed a small, inexpensive autonomous robot for map-building and target identification, designed to make use of a collaborative swarm-intelligence, minimizing the individual robots’ requirements, and allowing for a group of any number of robots to work in cooperation for optimized overall performance.

The robot is called AMIE (for “Autonomous Mobile Intelligent Entity”). AMIE is equipped with the Viper-Lite PC/104 form-factor single board processor as the main onboard computer. To gain situation awareness, AMIE is also equipped various sensors, such as ive LV-MaxSonar-EZ1 sonar sensors and five infrared sensors for obstacle avoidance, a CMUcam2 digital camera for target detection, and a 802.11b compact flash Linksys WCF12 card for inter-robot communication. AMIE is powered by laptop lithium-ion and actuated by permanent magnet motors with quadrature encoders. The group members are Adam K. Duda, Hoang Dang, Matthew R. Jacoby, and Nor Che Nazran. Their advisor is Professor Yan Meng, Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering.

The Vertically Articulating Wheelchair

“Though many technological improvements have been made to the conventional wheelchair in recent years, most of those have focused upon the user’s needs once in the chair,” says Professor Vikki Hazelwood, advisor to the team of biomedical engineering students who collaborated to design the Vertically Articulating Wheelchair.

On the other hand, no adaptive technologies have sufficiently addressed the user’s need to enter and exit the chair without assistance. The adaptive technology developed by this biomedical engineering team was conceived to offer individuals with disability, such as amputees or paraplegics, more independence to increase their activity levels and quality of live. The new wheelchair has been designed to allow a disabled individual to independently and safely enter and exit the chair.

The average wheelchair user is 31 years old. With the large number of returning Iraqi veterans with disabling injuries and amputations, this new wheelchair will help to rehabilitate them more effectively, giving them a better chance of returning to an active and healthy life. The project team members are Melissa Scott, Vadim Gordon, Elsner Loza and Ravi Buddhdew.

Integrated IV and PCA Pain Pump

The acute and cyclical nature of labor pains for women preparing for childbirth is unique. Conventional treatments for labor pain, such as epidural injections pose some risk to mother and baby.

A safer option is to treat the pain with an intravenous injection. The challenge with such a treatment, however, is that in addition to a constant “background drip”, a special, fast acting pain medicine needs to be injected each time the labor pain begins. Currently, this method is done manually by doctors and nurses, when a sufficient amount of qualified staff can remain with the mother in labor.

The new invention presented by this biomedical engineering team has developed an integrated system that enables automated delivery of the special fast acting medicine, providing the hospital staff with a simple, safe and accurate means to deliver the proper dosage as needed to mitigate the labor pain. By automating this method, less staff is required and more women may have access to safer labor pain management alternatives. The team members are Lily Abellana, Patrick Brose, Lindsay Doyle and Jamie Tutt. Professor Hazelwood advises the team.

Guggenheim Museum and Surface Crack Restoration

This is an unusual Civil Engineering project being pursued by a team of one – Civil Engineering Senior Kiley Rode, who was recently awarded the prestigious SOM Fellowship to study architectural structures in Europe during the summer of 2007.

The design project involves the analysis of the causes of surface cracks and suggestions of solution methodology for an iconic American structure. To help her study, the Guggenheim Museum released the original drawings of Frank Lloyd Wright, through legal agreements signed by Stevens and the museum.

After studying the original drawings of the building, Ms. Rode performed analytical calculations to understand the causes of such cracks. Although intrinsic brittle properties of concrete are at play, it seems that the governing factor for such long-term cracks is the dynamic effect of wind. The structure, being a juxtaposition of truncated cylinders, is quite flexible, and thereby effects large tensile stresses.

Based on her analysis, Ms. Rode explored various methods of repair that have been suggested by others and also studied ones that totally involved materials that have been developed in recent years. In addition to these possible repair methods, her research details a new innovative material application of Engineered Cementitious Composite (ECC), which may be deemed to be the most feasible, least intrusive solution to the problem of the cracking. This material is shown to have high durability, long term performance and exhibit exceptional behavior under harsh environmental conditions and fatigue loading. Professors Leslie Brunell and Khondokar Billah advised Ms. Rode.

About Stevens Institute of Technology

Founded in 1870, Stevens Institute of Technology is one of the leading technological universities in the world dedicated to learning and research. Through its broad-based curricula, nurturing of creative inventiveness, and cross disciplinary research, the Institute is at the forefront of global challenges in engineering, science, and technology management. Partnerships and collaboration between, and among, business, industry, government and other universities contribute to the enriched environment of the Institute. A new model for technology commercialization in academe, known as Technogenesis®, involves external partners in launching business enterprises to create broad opportunities and shared value.

Stevens offers baccalaureates, master’s and doctoral degrees in engineering, science, computer science and management, in addition to a baccalaureate degree in the humanities and liberal arts, and in business and technology. The university has a total enrollment of 2,150 undergraduate and 3,500 graduate students, with about 250 full-time faculty. Stevens’ graduate programs have attracted international participation from China, India, Southeast Asia, Europe and Latin America. Additional information may be obtained from its web page at www.stevens.edu.  

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