The Malott Innovation Awards are the culmination of ME463, Purdue's capstone class for seniors in Mechanical Engineering.  Teams of students work closely with faculty members and industry partners to create prototype products, continually refining and improving them using the knowledge from their engineering courses over the last four years. At the end of the semester, the students present their final prototypes to a panel of Purdue ME alumni who work in various industries; this panel selects the award winning teams.

The top teams from the Fall 2022 Malott Innovation Awards are:

1st Place: Ariadne, Ethan Brown, Ivan Malov, Eric O’Keefe, Shyam Reddy, Fernando Vega. Current sensor technology is sufficiently advanced to allow for self-driving vehicles - and yet the most common device to help those with blindness is the standard white cane, and the most advanced is a vibrating cane. Team Ariadne has developed a haptic feedback glove, capable of communicating 3-dimensional spatial information to the user. This glove consists of 12 integrated vibration motors controlled via Bluetooth by an application running on the user’s smartphone. The application leverages either an iPhone’s FaceID camera or LiDAR camera to construct a highly precise representation of the user’s surroundings. By communicating raw spatial information, our device empowers users to have their own autonomy, unlike other devices which try to instruct the user on what movements to make. In addition, the application controlled platform is highly adaptable, with new mapping modes or features being only an update away.

Patent applications for this system have been filed via the Purdue Research Foundation Office of Technology Commercialization.

2nd Place: Just Kitten, Alexander Vuong, Isabel Parraga-Carrara, Juhwan Park, Tae Kim, Zachariah Beck. The AFM will be the secret to all hard-working cat parents. This Automatic Food Machine is the only one in the market that keeps wet food fresh for as long as needed and provides your cat with a balanced and nutritious meal. By storing up to seven cans and dispensing them based on the user’s needs, this cat-sized apparatus will open a fresh can of cat food, make the food available to the cat, and dispose of all trash automatically. Once all seven cans have been depleted, simply fill the machine back up, dispose of the collected trash, and feed your cat another seven times. The AFM can be used daily while you are at work, during a business trip, or even a weekend away, with minimum cleaning needed. Stay on the couch and keep your cat’s food coming with AFM.

3rd Place: Go With The Flow, Benjamin Casler, Justin York, Kenneth Mayberry, Nathan Ortt, Marc Schultz. For Boeing Commercial Aviation, Go With The Flow has developed a deployable vortex generator (VG) that deploys to the edge of an airplane flap on takeoff and landing, and retracts into the flap as needed. The team’s mechanism adheres to strict design criteria, being able to withstand Mach 0.3 airflow loads while remaining nearly perfectly flush with the surface of the flap. Furthermore, the entire mechanism must fit within an overall area of 7” by 7” inside the flap. The VG fulfills Boeing’s desire to reduce the noise generated by the flaps on approach to landing, as part of a larger effort to reduce noise pollution generated by their aircraft.

About the Malott Innovation Awards

The Malott Innovation Awards are supported by an endowment created in 2007 by Thomas J. Malott (BSME '62, HDR '02), to foster an innovation culture among Purdue Mechanical Engineering students.  Malott is the former president, CEO and director of Siemens Energy and Automation.  His career included executive positions with Parker-Hannifin and the Ransburg Corp., as well as serving on several corporate boards.  He was an inaugural member of the Purdue Foundation Development Council and was awarded the Outstanding Mechanical Engineer and Distinguished Engineering Alumnus awards in 1991 from the university.

Writer: Jared Pike, jaredpike@purdue.edu, 765-496-0374

Source: Greg Jensen, jensen23@purdue.edu, 765-496-0214