Each year, senior industrial and systems engineering students, spend their spring and fall semesters coming up with creative solutions to common, everyday problems, and before winter break they put their work on display.
Among this year’s projects you could find a cart that guides shoppers in GPS fashion to grocery shelves, a vending machine that alerts suppliers to restock items or drop prices on-the-spot to move slow-selling merchandise, and a system that allows caretakers to remotely assess the health and well-being of an elderly person living alone.
The inventions are at once an exercise in fantasy and reality. Fantasy, because students are charged to come up with imaginative approaches that often remind viewers of Rube Goldberg cartoons. But the students get jarred back to reality when charged to assess market needs, work within $500 budgets, and persuade a skeptical audience during a half-hour talk that their inventions have promise for further pursuit.
The students made their case to fellow students, alumni, family members and industry recruiters at the CoRE Building on December 7.
“I like to consider this class basic training for the people who are going to solve society’s problems and keep our country competitive a decade or two from now,” said E. A. Elsayed, professor of industrial and systems engineering. Elsayed has been leading the yearlong “Design of Engineering Systems” program over its nine-year history, with help from colleagues such as B. Basily and Thomas Boucher. He recalled former students who applied program skills to a start-up venture – a firm that used voice recognition technology to track visiting nurses calling in from patients’ homes.
Two other projects that this year’s students presented were a shock-absorbing packaging that enables low-flying aircraft to drop military supplies without a parachute and a paint mixer that automates the blending process to match any desired color.