HOUGHTON, Mich. (WZMQ) – Michigan Tech celebrated its 25th annual Design Expo this year, with over 1,000 students participating in Tuesday’s competition. Student levels varied from first-year engineering courses, to senior design and enterprise programs, all presenting their real-world projects.
“The main idea is for students to showcase their work to the world,” said Nagesh Hatti, the Director of the Enterprise Program at MTU. “All of the fantastic things that they do here.”
Projects included biomedical devices, hydro farming with changing coasts, lunar rovers, prosthetics, and many more.
One group including Sam Wrigley, Dominic Hall, Lily VanHevel, and Daegan Sayles-Devire, were all new to the Design Expo this year. The team, made up of two robotics engineering majors and two mechanical engineering majors, focused their project on those with post-traumatic brain injuries. They created a prototype for an upper-arm exoskeleton that further extends the users range of motion.
“We have an elbow joint, so, using flex sensors to measure rotation of the elbow and get an angle there, and then using a MATLAB program, we were able to get live rotation,” said Sayles-Devire. “It moves in time with the users bending elbow.”
As students have prepared for these presentations through months or even years of hard work, the Design Expo is a great gateway for future opportunities.
“It’s a great way for the interaction between the industry and our students,” said Hatti.
“You experience working with multiple people, on multiple different components,” said VanHevel.
Throughout the day, the teams were evaluated by over 80 judges, including alumni members and company representatives.
To learn more about Michigan Tech’s Design Expo, visit mtu.edu/enterprise.
