Team Big Bird Wins Top Prize at Summer Capstone Mini-Expo
July 31, 2024
By Chloe Arrington
Teams Big Bird and Achilles Foot were awarded first and second place at the Summer 2024 Georgia Tech Capstone Design Mini-Expo held on July 23.
Capstone Design is a culminating course offered to undergraduate students at Georgia Tech. Students work in teams to design, build, and test prototypes with real-world applications. The course also provides the opportunity to work with industry sponsors. At the end of each semester, students showcase their efforts at the expo with their final design prototype.
Team Big Bird included mechanical engineering students Josh Baffour, Trevor Jones, Minh Khuu, Amanda Kim, Gyeongjun Kim, and materials science and engineering student Asha Patel.
Sponsored by Safran Test Cells, the team's project was focused on improving Safran’s Big Bird transporter, which helps customers move their test cell engines from one location to another.
The team developed a set of modifications for the current Big Bird to enhance its efficiency. These modifications improved performance and were also more cost-effective than the competing solutions being offered.
Woodruff School student Trevor Jones said seeing the team's hard work pay off was wonderful. "We went into it at first thinking that we needed to reinvent the wheel, but after doing our due diligence, we understood the scope of our project and our direction. I think that helped with our success."
The second-place team, Achilles Foot, developed a bio-inspired foot for humanoid robots with multi-modal contact sensing to improve utilization in environments such as forests, mines, construction sites, granular media, icy surfaces, and other challenging landscapes.
Team members were mechanical engineering students Nicholas Beal, Gwen Diamond, Vincent Fang, Hilman Aqim Bin Khairudin, Ikechukwu Obi-Okoye, and Jimmy Pham.
Additional teams who presented their projects at the Mini-Expo included:
- Semaphore, who created an automated system to assemble and count custom toothpick flags.
- 'Murica, who developed a method to increase the production of lawn flags by eliminating reliance on third-party labor for low-value assembly.
- RoboRoses, who developed an automated flower sorting and conditioning system to reduce manual labor for florists.
Students enrolled in the Capstone Design course weren't the only ones in the spotlight at the event. Also recognized was a cohort of 21 students from local high schools and first-year transfer students from historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs) who completed an internship with the Flowers Invention Studio this summer.
During the internship, participants received training on tools and machinery, attended talks by faculty, and worked with student leadership to design and build prototypes for their projects.
The interns were invited to learn more about the engineering design process by attending the Capstone Design Mini-Expo, where they received a certificate of completion.
A photo gallery from the Summer 2024 Georgia Tech Capstone Design Mini-Expo can be viewed on Flickr.
As a new semester approaches, the Woodruff School seeks to collaborate with external partners on projects for the Fall 2024 Capstone Design course. For more information on how to participate, visit https://mecapstone.gatech.edu/sponsors/.
