Check These Out

CHECK THESE OUT: STUDENT INVENTIONS

Designing, building, and inventing are at the core of Tufts Engineering. Whether revolutionizing robot communication, advancing autonomous vehicles, or problem-solving patient-saving equipment during a pandemic, Tufts engineers don’t wait until after they graduate to innovate.

SENIOR DESIGN PROJECTS

Fighting COVID-19: Flowmeter: Tufts engineers solve problems outside and inside of the classroom. As part of his mechanical engineering design class, Kamar Godoy ’22 designed a flowmeter that would help adjust ventilators to treat more COVID-19 patients. As hospitals became more crowded and life support resources more limited at the height of the pandemic, doctors projected the need to have four people per ventilator. Kamar’s apparatus could help further reconfigure ventilators and balance airflow equally to multiple people.

Smart Water Distribution System: You can find many Tufts engineers partnering with local and global communities to kick-start their senior design projects. Max Ramer ’22, Aryaman Pandya ’22, Ethan Schreiber ’22, and Sinan Unan ’22 utilized programmable logic controllers with information stored on a human-machine interface panel to digitize and automate how a STEM school in Somaliland kept track of water levels and potential leaks in their water tanks. The project not only tested their electrical and computer engineering knowledge…it also challenged them to flex their fluency in carpentry, electrician skills, and plumbing.

Addressing Medical Non-Adherence in the Elderly: For their product design class, Becky Lee ’22, Katie Jordan ’22, Noaf Alsheikh-Ali ’22, and Sami Rubin ’22 formed the team MedCo and took on a challenge from Design Science, a human factors engineering company located in Pennsylvania. For this semester-long project, the team performed user research, planned usability tests, and designed an app and interactive pillbox to help address medical non-adherence in the elderly population.

Navigating an Asteroid: If you can’t send a human to explore the rocky terrain of an asteroid, you can ask Anoushka Alavilli ’22, John Batchelor ’22, John Freeman ’22, James Lai ’22, Keenan Rhea ’22, and Rebecca Skantar ’22 to send their robot instead. GPS isn’t as reliable for navigating the unknown (and potentially hazardous) surface of an asteroid, so this team built a robot outfitted with a LiDAR sensor, an inertial measurement unit, and a camera that allows it to safely make its way around obstacles and orient itself in new surroundings.

CLASS AND JUST FOR FUN PROJECTS

Visualizing a Robot’s Perspective of the World: Want to learn what’s going on inside the mind of a robot? Professors Jivko Sinapov and James Schomolze tasked their students to better understand the what and the how of a robot’s mind. Throughout the course, they built augmented reality software to project robots’ inner thoughts. This brought them one step closer to improving how robots communicate with humans.

Lopbot: What can Tufts engineers invent with a budget of $400 and three months’ time? A group of human factors engineers created a vacuum impeller, motor, suction mechanism, and power system...all to build their very own autonomous, high-powered, high-​ volume, industrial shop vac!

Coding the Green Line: Did you know that a new stop on the extension of the Boston subway system is coming to Tufts? Students in our Data Structures course were assigned the project of creating efficient code for this train system. They built out and applied algorithms to keep track of passengers embarking and disembarking trains and the movement of train cars between stations.

Programming a Pendulum: When she was assigned a pendulum project with other students in her engineering science class, Madeline Fabela ’23 faced her first-ever intensive coding challenge. After building a two-foot-tall pendulum in the Nolop FAST Facility, her team gathered data about the acceleration, displacement, and speed of the pendulum, and then wrote a script that analyzed and plotted the data. The project not only introduced her to computer programming, but also allowed her to better understand what she was learning in her physics course.

Smart Toys for Kids: Imagine building and inventing for kids attending a school right on the Tufts campus. For students enrolled in Inventing Smart Toys for Kids, that is exactly what happened. One team brought together circuits, writing code, and crafting puzzle pieces with neodymium magnets to develop an electronic puzzle that would know when it has been completed. They even created an app so parents could see how long it took their children to complete the puzzle.

TEMS Tracker: Tufts students are always helping each other! Design for Social Good (DSG) club members worked together with Tufts’ Emergency Medical Services (TEMS) to create an ambulance tracker system. Built from Arduinos, this tracker updates the location of the university’s EMS truck every 10 seconds and collects driving data. With this information, the student EMTs working for TEMS can organize better shift changes and improve their response to medical emergencies. A safer and healthier campus to look forward to!

Passion Projects: Nolop is one of many makerspaces on our campus, and students flock to this space for the expert advice (and humor) from Nolop staff in addition to a wall of 3D printers (also known as the “3D printer farm”), laser cutters, oscilloscopes, and so much more. Students have made everything from an Adirondack chair to a tank robot to a rainbow clock to a pinball machine.