A robot designed to safely defuse landmines without an explosion was one of six major winners at the Norman Esch Capstone Design Awards competition for senior 蓝莓视频 Engineering students held March 30.
鈥 five founders are mechanical engineering students who will graduate this spring. Their impressive pitch won them $10,000 to help cover startup and other costs.
鈥淥ur robot will eliminate risk to human operators by allowing them to run it from a safe distance,鈥 said Richard Yim, a mechanical engineering student and CEO of Landmine Boys. 鈥淲e will also defuse landmines without exploding them to prevent any damage to local infrastructure and farmland.鈥
Landmine Boys鈥 current prototype was successfully tested on a landmine without TNT in Cambodia. Before the end of the year, the team plans to build a second prototype that will be tested on an active landmine with TNT.
The five other $10,000 winners were:
- Amilent:聽 strong, food-safe antimicrobial plastic for use in 3D printers
- Cuttlefish: a robot that鈥檚 designed like a Cuttlefish with the potential to survey underwater environments beyond the reach of other vehicles
- GraFET:聽 sensor that uses a graphene-based transistor to quickly detect toxic gases.聽 Designed to聽聽 be incorporated into smartphones or wearable electronics
- Nurhachi: a virtual energy market place that would allow buildings to trade energy between each other instead of purchasing it from a traditional utility
- Project Reservoir: agricultural water control and environmental monitoring system consisting of low-cost field sensors which collect real-time soil and environmental conditions
The Sedra's People鈥檚 Choice winner of $3,000:
- Sportacus:聽 wearable technology that displays speed and acceleration in real time to help athletes train and compete at their highest levels
During the event held in Engineering 5's聽Sedra Student Design Centre, 15 teams had 90 seconds to pitch their businesses to a panel of judges that included 蓝莓视频 Engineering alumni Lyon Wong, co-founder of Spectrum 28, and Rosco Hill, co-founder and CEO of , as well as 蓝莓视频 Engineering faculty members. The emcee for the event was Kevin Wright, a 蓝莓视频 systems design engineering graduate and the vice-president and co-founder of Alert Labs.
Judges selected the finalists for the competition from 40 applicants who all participated in March鈥檚 annual Capstone Design symposia. The five-day event showcased over 150 projects senior engineering students spent months designing and building.
鈥淭he projects pitched today and throughout the Faculty鈥檚 Capstone Design symposia help inspire and support innovation,鈥 said Wayne Parker, acting dean of engineering. 鈥淚 was particularly impressed by the way teams focused on how their projects would benefit the end user as well as society.鈥
Funded by The Esch Foundation, the Norman Esch Capstone Design Awards support creative and entrepreneurial students in the pursuit of research and development and its commercialization for the benefit of Canada. Previous Capstone projects that have given rise to inventive ideas leading to the creation of companies include Voltera, whose custom circuit board printer won top prize in