First-year Engineering students, Sid Gaur, Atharva Rao, Benjamin John Leith Murray and Joachim Tobias Velasco Bautista, earned the grand prize as Team TRAWS in the West Lafayette Smart City Challenge. They were advised by Sean Brophy, associate professor of engineering education.

Four Purdue College of Engineering first-year students took the grand prize as team TRAWS in the West Lafayette Smart City Challenge,  a $10,000 award and the opportunity to pilot their innovative solution in West Lafayette. The West Lafayette Smart City Challenge called on startups and student teams to develop a scalable Internet-of-Things solution or software application to improve safety for vulnerable road users during high-trafficked periods.

Team TRAWS was advised by Sean Brophy, associate professor of engineering education, and led by four College of Engineering students: Sid Gaur (from Reno, Nevada), Atharva Rao (from Phoenix, Arizona), Benjamin John Leith Murray (from Apex, North Carolina), and Joachim Tobias Velasco Bautista (from Binan, Philippines).

After advancing to the third and final phase of the competition, TRAWS earned the unique opportunity to run a six-month pilot in Discovery Park District at Purdue. All four students also secured a one-year membership to the NineTwelve Convergence Lab. TRAWS’ solution emerged as the most scalable and promising idea that could help reduce traffic accidents and injuries. Their solution involves using a sensor array to detect and analyze roadway and pathway activity and congestion and then provide information back to roadway users through “smart” road signs to raise awareness of specific safety and congestion situations.

“Based on the ingenuity and engineering spirit we have seen so far from these outstanding Purdue students, we’re excited to see how TRAWS executes their solution during the next phase in a real-world deployment,” said Troy Hege, vice president of Innovation and Technology at the Purdue Research Foundation. “We think the concepts of a broadly deployed smart road sign platform has a lot of potential, so we are interested to see where this goes.”

The viability and potential impact of TRAWS’ solution convinced the Challenge Committee during the West Lafayette Smart City Challenge Demo Day, where TRAWS demonstrated its prototype. The Challenge Committee included subject matter experts from technology companies, who also served as mentors for the three finalist teams during the prototyping phase. 

“The inspired innovation, demonstrated not just by TRAWS but by all the finalists, has been terrific,” said Erin Easter, director of development for the City of West Lafayette. “We were looking for novel approaches to improve multimodal congestion and safety, and we ended up with three great concepts.”

The West Lafayette Smart City Challenge was launched in late September 2021 as a joint effort between the Innovation Partners Institute (IPI) at the Purdue Research Foundation, The City of West Lafayette, the Indiana 5G Zone, and US Ignite. Any university-based faculty/student team or US-owned and operated start-up with fewer than 25 employees could submit a proposal. Ultimately three finalists were selected to advance to the prototyping phase. TRAWS has moved on to the third and final phase to pilot the solution for the City of West Lafayette.

Additional details about the West Lafayette Smart City Challenge can be found at discoveryparkdistrict.com/wlsmartcitychallenge-21.