Winter Design Review Showcases Complex Ideas
March 29, 2018 - The UC Irvine Student Center’s Pacific Ballroom bustled with energy as nearly 800 engineering students packed the house with their senior design projects at the 2018 Winter Design Review in March. The event featured a record 144 projects, including poster displays and demonstrations. After working on their projects for two quarters, the students proudly showed their ideas to industry reviewers as well as a wider audience of faculty and staff.
“I am so proud to see the number of projects here, and to see these projects at this level of complexity,” said Maria Tirabassi, vice president of engineering space systems at Northrop Grumman Aerospace Systems, a signature sponsor of the 2018 Winter Design Review. “I see concepts here that we can take into the future. Congratulations.”
As students streamed into the ballroom to set up their displays, about 50 industry representatives gathered for the Dean’s Breakfast. “Each year, this event gets bigger and better,” said Samueli School Dean Gregory Washington. “What’s special about this design review is that student get to take what they’ve learned in the three or four years and put it into projects for you to appreciate today. You’ll see that our students are prepared to go out into the real world.”
Stephen Palm ‘87, senior technical director at Broadcom Corp., enjoyed talking to the students. He was especially impressed with the teams of the Piano Apprentice and the Gamification of Respiratory Therapy Device projects, saying they really understood the engineering process. “It was exciting to see they had passion in solving problems,” said Palm, a UCI electrical engineering alumnus. “I had an interest in six projects specifically and asked hard questions; I would say about four out of the six had good answers.”
Each year, Washington singles out a dozen or so projects for Dean’s Choice Awards. For this special recognition, he identifies projects that aim to meet grand challenges (combat disease, improve health or wellness, improve environmental/energy sustainability, provide energy efficiency), are viable or practical and could lead to commercialization, or are innovative and cool, with a “wow” factor. He selected 13 teams for the award this year (see below).
One of the winners was Roboeye, a robotic guide that helps the visually impaired cross the street. Electrical engineering student Farah Arabi explained that her team wanted to do something to help the blind on campus, so over the summer they talked to the disability center. “We learned that cross walks are where the most accidents happen, so we trained a robot dog to be a guide for the visually impaired,” said Arabi.
While the fourth-year students filled the ballroom, 33 teams of freshman engineering students were over in the Doheny Room putting the final additions on their first-year projects for the quadcopter competition. This contest is a culmination of the Introduction to Engineering class taught by instructors Lawrence Kulinsky and Lily Wu.
Now in its sixth year, the freshman experiential learning class gives students an opportunity to design, build and test a multidisciplinary project in their first year of study. This year, in addition to the 184 freshmen who built quadcopters for autonomous payload delivery, 48 students created fitness trackers and customized apps for step counting, and 31 students worked on a microfluidic/lab-on-a-chip project for autonomous concentration detection.
The task for the quadcopters was to autonomously deliver payloads (foam golf balls) based on sensing of color (red and blue) and distance (4 to 5 feet). The quadcopters used ultrasonic and vision sensors to identify the correct distance range and color, which then activated a servo to drop a ball. The winning team, called Ball Droppers, successfully delivered two payloads within 20.7 seconds.
2018 Dean’s Choice Awards:
Bioprinter for High-throughput Pharmaceutical Development
A 3-D bioprinter for pharmaceutical development applications.
Students: McKell Davis (leader), Sydney Minar, Ethan Lieberman, Dereck Lublin, Alex Schmidt
Mentor: Professor Elliot Botvinick
Fabrication of Nanopatterns on a Curved Polymer Cornea Device
A modified and simplified fabrication method of imprinting nanostructures onto a polymer cornea implant.
Students: Cesar Ramales (leader), Heejun Chough, Calvin Li, Brendon Tran, Mai Yang
Mentor: Professor Albert Yee
Gamifying Respiration Therapy Device
An incentivized therapeutic device designed to help pediatric pulmonary patients improve their breathing technique.
Students: Evelyn Vasquez (leader), Lucy Zhuang, Truc Dinh, Nini Nguyen, Zhen Wan
Mentor: Professor Michelle Khine
Student Inspired Structure: Guitar-shaped Art and Music Museum with Green Roof
Design of a guitar-shaped museum complex topped with a green roof.
Students: Abdulmohsen Alkharafi, Juan Alonso, Itzel Guerrero, Antheia Li, Manuel Macias, Samyam Manandhar
Client Consultant: Rachel Goossens, KPFF Consulting Engineers
San Vicente Energy Storage Project
Design of an energy storage system based on building an upper reservoir, tunnels and a pump turbine system.
Students: Mark Doss, Pooyan Farshidfard, Pauline Nguyen, Tuong Nguyen, Elizabeth Njuguna, Aiqian Shen
Client Consultant: Richard Tremblath, Tremblath Consulting
Automated Casino Loss-Prevention
This project can detect cheating or advantage play in blackjack by monitoring multiple games on a cloud server. The casino’s security cameras feed still images to the system over an encrypted connection.
Students: Rudy Aquino, Brandt Bucher, Syed Omer Azeemuddin
Advisor: Pooria Yaghini
Autonomous Racecar
This project creates commercial transportation controlled by software rather than human supervision.
Students: Aaron Liao, Kelvin Phan, Julian Andrews, Michael Choi
Advisor: Mohammad A. Al Faruque
Roboeye
A robotic guide that helps the visually impaired cross an intersection.
Students: Farah Arabi, Kelly Hong, Autumn Hom Lee, Tiffany Thy Ho Tran
Advisor: Rainer Doemer
AIAA Design Build Fly
The UCI Design/Build/Fly team designs, manufactures and competes electric remote-control airplanes in the annual international D/B/F competition, allowing students to validate analytic studies through practical application and gain real-world aircraft design experience.
Students: Samuel Bryce Hince, Ryan Luu, Carlos O. Macias, Alejandro Montiel, Tina Nguyen, Oguzhan Ozhan, Weixuan Pan, Wesley Platt, Michael Pagdonsolan Jr., Ryan Razo, Kevin Sadeghian, Marlon Sevilla, Wael Shuaibi, Karen Torres, Nathan Yeung
Advisor: Robert Liebeck
HyperXite
The UCI HyperXite team is creating a prototype Hyperloop pod for entry into the SpaceX competition over the summer. Since building a scalable Hyperloop pod requires various multidisciplinary skillsets, the entire HyperXite team incorporates over 30 mechanical, aerospace, civil, electrical and computer undergraduate engineering students who all have area-specific skills ranging from simulation to manufacturing and design.
Students: Andrew Tec, Chanceleir Schilling, Khaled Takwa, Adora Tadros, Allen Tien-Tse Chang, Carol Reyes, Derek Kai-Lee Cheng, Dong Kim, Enpei Wu, Harmeet Gill, Jagdeep Batther, Jason Lee, Jessica Ma, Jiahui Cao, Kelly Duong Quach, Kim Tran, Kyle Ferreira, Kyle Monahan, Leslie Hsiao, Lisheng Wang, Mark Mekkittikul, Matthew Casper, Mazen Alkhatib, Miles Richman, Mohamed Idris, Nicholas Oune, Nicolas Delouise, Rebecca Lim, Sean McCutcheon, Sergio Linares, Shreshth Kumar, Trevor Yasutake, Will Burre, Woo Yoong Chong, Youngon Lee, Youssef Iskander
Advisor: Roger Rangel
Survivor Detection & Location Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (SDL UAV)
A drone equipped with a microwave transmission and detection system that can find victims trapped underneath debris in a crash or natural disaster.
Students: Andrew Tran, Chad Carvalho, Winston Freeman, Scott Yamamoto, Justyn Elliott-Jones
Advisor: Ian Harris
Flapping MAV
The project’s objective is to design, fabricate and fly a micro-air vehicle capable of hovering. The vehicle has to be less than 15 cm in length, width and height.
Students: Siddharth Baranwa, Branson Davis, Missael Hernandez, Andrew Iwamoto, Chenxi Ji, Kayla Jue, Tyler Lee, David Nguyen, Wai Hnin Oo, Yizhou Pan, Bao Pham, Fernando Pablo Quevedo, Jeffrey Staton, Lisheng Wang, Haocheng Yu
Advisor: Haithem Taha
Rehab Robotics – Mpowrd Wheelchair
A mechanically, patient-operated wheelchair with rehabilitation capabilities for stroke patients in developing countries. The project consists of optimizing the original MPOWRD wheelchair, making it more robust, durable, transportable and adjustable for different stroke patients. This wheelchair helps provide physical therapy for stroke patients and a method for transportation through mechanical levers attached to the sides of the wheelchair where the wheels are located.
Students: Marlayna Montenegro, Nick Talebi, Michael Chavez, Matthew Gonzalez, Dalton Conroy, Caitlin Callaghan
Advisor: David Reinkensmeyer
– Lori Brandt
