Building their future: NIU seniors showcase engineering inventions

DeKALB – For aspiring engineers at Northern Illinois University, a highlight of their senior year tackles a year-long invention project, which is presented to the community and, potentially, future employers in the spring.

The two-day event saw more than 150 NIU students seeking bachelor degrees in engineering showcase their inventions and builds based on the skills they’ve learned throughout their school career. The demonstrations also help students get a feel for pitching their inventions to industry experts, showcasing how they’ve applied what they’ve learned in the classroom to solving real-world problems.

NIU senior Daniel Ibarra’s group created a semi-autonomous lawn care robot, which spreads fertilizer granules all on its own.

“People have found it very cool,” Ibarra said May 5 as he presented his project to dozens of community members, school groups, professors and Design Day attendees. “We’ve got a lot of comments about not just fertilizer spreading but also salt application, especially here in the winter. I’m from Florida so it’s always in the back of my mind, like fertilizer you can do all year. This has potential to be applied to things outside of just fertilizer.”

Ibarra and three other NIU seniors with special interests in mechanical engineering worked since August to build the prototype robot, the first of two generations of designs he hopes to build, he said.

“Our goal was to create the mechanical movement system, payload container, spreader, get a rudimentary electronic system up and running, and then some sort of rudimentary autonomous system,” Ibarra said.

“All four of us have an interest in design in mechanical engineering and things like that in general so to be able to take something from an original concept idea and turn that into a functioning prototype for Demo Day has been awesome.”

—  Daniel Ibarra, NIU College of Engineering senior

The Senior Design Day was held from noon until 4:30 p.m. May 5 in DeKalb. NIU seniors formed teams to tackle their projects together during the year before presenting them to the public during the event.

Ibarra and his team’s robot works with two distance sensors that are connected to what he called a roboclaw, allowing the invention’s five motors to work together to turn the spreader.

Senior design students received project ideas from their professors and then were tasked with the all-year challenge of building a product. From design trial and error to end result – or as Ibarra called it, “A Roomba for your lawn” – products are meant to help students work on problem solving, group work and bringing ideas to life.

“All four of us have an interest in design in mechanical engineering and things like that in general so to be able to take something from an original concept idea and turn that into a functioning prototype for Demo Day has been awesome,” Ibarra said. “So that opportunity to start from scratch and build up something interested us all. We all have a different background in terms of our interests.”

It’s the group work that makes NIU’s Senior Design and Demonstrations Day stand out amongst its higher education counterparts, said Stephen Samuels, former NIU professor and current director of diversity and retention.

“This is a great opportunity for our senior students to get the experience of organizing what they have ... to get professional exposure, professional experience about speaking about their projects but at the same it’s exposure to the community,” Samuels said.

STEM – or science, technology, engineering and math – is an always-growing field of study for both students and in the workforce. Samuels said NIU also takes great care in helping expose under-represented minority communities to STEM. According to the Pew Research Center, Black and Hispanic groups have been historically underrepresented in STEM fields.

NIU engineering senior Ghislain Bugere said his group created a prototype contact lens that can read the appearance of someone’s eye to help detect abnormalities.

“It was my professor’s idea,” Bugere said. “He’s been studying a lot of eye cancer, skin cancer. He came up with a theory that a tumor actually affects the appearance of the skin or eye, and our goal was just to design a contact lens that would be able to read the appearance of the eye, and find out if they have a tumor or not.”

For Bugere and his team, they came up with a wireless contact lens that measures of the appearance of the eye.

“Studies show that the appearance of the eye is easy [to read] if you have a healthy tissue, or healthy eye,” Bugere said. “So you wear the contact lens, you get a reader, ideally the reader will be your phone as a power source. You bring it close to the eye, and you have a battery in your eye that gives feedback to the phone.”

The reader and the contact wearer, then, can compare measurements of both their eyes to help inform them, Bugere said.

As with all inventions, Bugere’s team’s task came with trial and error.

“There’s nothing out there like this,” Bugere said. “We basically, as you can see, have a lot of prototypes, failures and some things that worked, until we got the final one that worked. The biggest challenge was the circuit ... it was so hard to get it to sit on the contact surface.”

For Design Day, area school groups also were encouraged to attend the showcase, to explore future pathways of interest or, most hopefully for Samuels, to see that NIU is a resource for successful STEM education in their own backyard.

Senior Design Day is a requirement for all College of Engineering and Engineering Technology students to graduate, Samuels said. It also can offer students a chance to get their foot in the door at future tech companies in their field of interest.

Samuels said he has a student that’s working for NASA now, and four others set to take up STEM jobs in California in June. Representatives from NASA, Tesla, Google, Mitsubishi and other well-known tech or mechanic companies have been known to recruit out of NIU, too, he said.

One company, North Carolina-based Collins Aerospace, one of the world’s largest suppliers of aerospace and defense products, has entered a formal partnership with NIU, Samuels said. The company also has an electric power systems division out of Rockford, according to NIU.

Collins Aerospace, which also had representatives present during the Senior Design Day, provides NIU with $25,000 yearly to aid diversity and inclusion in the field of STEM, Samuels said.

“STEM is growing in a lot of communities where there’s minority communities in the United States and even globally, so we want to make sure that STEM and specifically here in engineering is exposed to middle school, high school, community colleges,” Samuels said. “And of course we would love to represent NIU, use it as a recruitment tool but still at the same time we want to introduce engineering and STEM to the community.”