Undergraduate students presented their culminating capstone projects as part of the second annual Senior Capstone Competition, sponsored by the Convergence of Innovation and Entrepreneurship (CIE) Institute. The competition gives undergraduates a unique opportunity to hone their entrepreneurial skills as well as the chance to win cash prizes to fund future endeavors on their projects. Six teams were selected by the capstone competition committee, which included industry professor Michael Knox and associate professor of chemical and biomolecular engineering, and CIE Institute director Jin Montclare, to pitch their prototypes to a panel of reputed judges at the NYU Tandon School of Engineering’s 2017 Research Expo.
First Place
First-place winners Dimitrios Lintzeris and Daniel Targonski, both majors in electrical engineering, created a fully autonomous pedestrian traffic counter that tracks and gathers data on the number of people passing by a business during a day.
Second Place
The statistics are staggering for deaths resulting from collisions between bicyclists and motor vehicles. With an estimated 40% of these fatalities occurring after a car crashed into a bicyclist from behind, electrical engineering students Aimee Nogoy, Takuya Fukui, and Wai San Gu created the safety device RadarWAT to alert cyclists to cars that are approaching too closely behind their bicycle.
Third Place
The third place prize went to Frederick Bills, Artur Chodor, Bartosz Chodor, Garrett Harbeson, Sakir Hossain, and Katrina Johnk, who designed and manufactured an aircraft for the Society of Aerospace Engineers (SAE) Aero Design East 2017 competition. Students engineered a model passenger aircraft that maximizes the passenger and cargo load, while minimizing power consumption. Featuring a dual-airfoil wing, an octagonal fuselage and staggered passenger seating arrangement that resulted in less drag, the team’s design placed 15th out of 40 teams in the regular competition class, and secured 14th place for the Highest Payload — a feat for many of the team members in their first foray in aeroplane design.
Check out the full article by Camila Ryder that covers Capstone 2017.