Putting is arguably the most important skill in golf; in fact, it’s been described as a game within a game. Now a team of Rice engineering students has devised a training putter that offers golfers audio, visual and tactile feedback to help them learn a consistent putting stroke.
“In the past few years, some work has been done on modeling the physics of putting,” said Ray Simar, Rice professor in the practice of electrical and computer engineering who tasked five seniors with designing and creating a putter that provides multisensory feedback. “In particular, how the ball rolls, trajectories on the green and also the sweep path and how that should perform.
“I pitched the students on ‘What if we build a putter that we could drive from the perspective of the physics?’”
Working in Rice’s Oshman Engineering Design Kitchen, the students, who call themselves Team Jedi Putter, have finished a prototype and filed for a patent on a putter that has an accelerometer (to provide club speed), a gyrometer (for measuring rotation and to judge if the face of the club is twisting) and a magnetometer (to tell if the club head is up or down) all in the head of the club.
“It’s the first multisensory, real-time feedback training putter,” said Rice senior electrical engineering student Matthew Lopez. “It’s geared for beginning to intermediate golfers to help them learn a consistent putting stroke. Our main focus is not aiming on the green but rather getting consistent putts, so once you know where to aim you can hit that spot every time.” The team will address improving the golfer’s aim in an upcoming prototype.
Simar’s original idea was for the data from the club to be downloadable after the player’s practice session; the students did that and went a step further: They designed the sensors to give real-time feedback via the grip of the putter. If a user’s club head moves up or down, doesn’t move through a straight path or twists, the sensors in the head signal vibration to the grip. The user practices with the three-dimensional sensors until they have a “clean” stroke at the ball.
Team Jedi photo by Jeff Fitlow/Rice University
“The idea is that while you’re in the motion of the putt, it will deliver audio, visual and tactile feedback to help you correct your stroke,” said Rice senior mechanical engineering student Sid Mullick. “The correct stroke is rooted in basic physics. You want to achieve a straight back-and-front stroke, a linear stroke, and you want to swing at the resonance frequency of the pendulum formed by your arms and the putter. We have all that in our algorithms, and we’re able to deliver feedback to the golfer that no other product can deliver right now.”
The practice putter can also provide data to the user though a Bluetooth-enabled device, such as their smartphone or computer, where players can analyze the data and their stroke.
Moving forward, the team plans to introduce a speaker in the head to help a user synchronize their swing to tones – much like a metronome, and they will be adding a laser in the center of the club head to assist with impacting the ball squarely. The team has also produced a “dummy” club that is designed and weighted the same as Jedi Putter but without the electronics, making it useable in real golf play.
Team Jedi Putter Rice seniors are Lopez, Mullick, Chelsea Rodrigues, Roy Wu and Yize Zhao.
Two years in the making, the new Rice Solar Car made its public debut at the Engineering Design Showcase and Poster Competition.
If the mold fits, drive it.
That could be the motto for the Rice Solar Car Club, which is preparing its entry for the Shell Eco-marathon in downtown Houston later this month.
Zihe Huang, electrical lead on the Solar Car Team, makes an adjustment during construction of this year's vehicle in preparation for the Shell Eco-marathon. Photo by Jeff Fitlow
The team is racing to finish its efficient carbon-fiber vehicle in time for the national event, to be held April 25-27 at a temporary track around downtown Houston’s Discovery Green, near the George R. Brown Convention Center.
It will be Rice’s second appearance in the event. The Eco-marathon draws competitors from academic institutions all over the United States, Canada and Mexico, with a few entries from South America as well. In 2012, the first Rice team finished second in the prototype solar category.
Instead of rushing into another production cycle, the club decided to take a year to think about its next vehicle and started from scratch. The sleek new car is custom-molded from carbon fiber and fed power through a much smaller solar panel system than the first entry.
The car is technically more of a solar-assisted car, according to club president Juan Borbon, a Jones College junior majoring in mechanical engineering. “The first year, we had a huge array of solar cells, but the goal with this car is to have something more practical,” he said. “The competition limited the array size significantly.”
Ben Lewis, one of several who will drive Rice's entry in the Eco-marathon, works on the vehicle at Ryon Lab. Photo by Jeff Fitlow
The solar panel, pre-built and packaged in Germany, supplies about 100 watts to the car’s battery pack and measures less than a square meter, said Zihe Huang, the team’s electrical lead and a Jones College senior. “The solar array is encapsulated with a film with a pyramid structure that allows it to use light that isn’t directly above the cell,” he said.
The carbon fiber body, the driver’s seat and elements of the chassis were painstakingly formed in huge polystyrene molds custom milled by a company in California and shipped to Rice, Borbon said. He expected the completed car to weigh between 300 and 400 pounds minus the driver.
Jones College junior Ben Lewis, who worked on the 2012 team and is likely to be one of the drivers, with Borbon, has confidence in the build quality. “Surprisingly, I’m not that concerned about my safety,” he said. “We took the seat out yesterday and I jumped on the chassis with all of my weight, and it was perfectly fine.”
Admirers at the Engineering Design Showcase view the Rice Solar Car that will race in the upcoming Shell Eco-marathon. Photo by Jeff Fitlow
The drivers will take their black beauty for time trials around a six-mile course, 10 laps around Discovery Green. The car will also be judged for efficiency.
This will be the last Eco-marathon in Houston, as the North American race will move to Detroit in 2015. Borbon couldn’t say for sure whether Rice will compete in future years, but said there are a number of competitions within reach of Houston. The solar car club is advised by Andrew Dick, an assistant professor of mechanical engineering.
Borbon and his colleagues on the 15-member team are also strategizing for Rice cars to come. “We’re thinking of pitching engineering teams to take on more components in future years,” said Borbon, who noted that one freshman design team is building accessories like side mirrors and wipers for this year’s edition.
Keep up with the team’s progress as it races toward the deadline at its blog, www.solarcar.rice.edu/blog/
Rice University senior design team BiliQuant has wasted no time collecting awards for its low-cost method of diagnosing jaundice.
Team members Stephanie Tzouanas and Melody Tan took first place last week in the poster competition at the University of Minnesota’s Design of Medical Devices Conference International Student Showcase. Add that to BiliQuant’s second-place finish at this spring’s Rice Undergraduate Venture Challenge and its Most Impactful Award from the Houston Global Health Collaborative’s Connect Conference, and the five-member team can already count 2014 as a banner year.
But there’s more to BiliQuant than a shelf full of awards for the team, which consists of Brown College’s Tan, Jones College’s Tzouanas, Rohan Shah and Monica Barrera and Wiess College’s Jacinta Leyden.
“This team was tasked with solving a hard problem, and they’ve definitely risen to the challenge,” said BiliQuant faculty adviser Maria Oden, professor in the practice of bioengineering and director of Rice’s Oshman Engineering Design Kitchen. “For me, the most exciting part of this will happen later, when the technology is field-tested. If this works in a clinical setting, it could impact many lives.”
BiliQuant team members (from left) Monica Barrera, Stephanie Tzouanas, Melody Tan, Rohan Shah and Jacinta Leyden.
Jaundice is characterized by the yellowing of the skin and affects about 60 percent of infants worldwide. The condition is caused by elevated levels of bilirubin, a byproduct of the body’s constant replenishment of red blood cells. For some infants, including about 2.5 million each year in sub-Saharan Africa, bilirubin can build up to levels that can cause permanent brain damage.
It’s easy to treat jaundiced babies with phototherapy units that deliver a type of blue light that breaks down bilirubin. The lights are available in many developing-world hospitals undefined and Rice’s global-health students have even tackled the problem of lowering the cost for them undefined but diagnosing which babies to treat is still a big problem.
“You can appropriately diagnose jaundice using a number of tests that are completely unsuitable for the developing world,” Tzouanas said. “It can be diagnosed from blood samples, but the tests typically require a centrifuge, which most developing-world hospitals do not have. There are also devices that shine light on the infant’s skin, but these are expensive, and they don’t work well on infants who are dark-skinned.”
As a result, most physicians in the developing world diagnose jaundice simply by looking for signs of yellowing skin. Because it is difficult to accurately gauge the severity of jaundice by sight, there’s a dual risk of both undertreatment and overtreatment.
BiliQuant prototype
“We knew that our solution would need to be inexpensive, and one thing that often drives up costs is disposables undefined the things like plastic cuvettes that we think nothing of using once and throwing away,” Tzouanas said.
Building on point-of-care hemoglobin-testing concepts developed by bioengineering graduate student Meaghan Bond and her faculty adviser, Department of Bioengineering Chair Rebecca Richards-Kortum, the team created a test system that uses paper strips. Their test involves pricking the baby’s heel and collecting a tiny spot of blood on the paper. The paper is then inserted into a slot in a small machine, where inexpensive LED lights shine through the paper. An onboard microprocessor converts the acquired signal into the concentration of bilirubin present, and the value obtained is read out on a small LCD screen. Estimated cost per test: one penny.
Though the idea is simple, the implementation hasn’t been, particularly given the problems associated with separating blood components and achieving the target accuracy, plus or minus five milligrams of bilirubin per deciliter of blood.
“Hemoglobin has a very high optical density, and its signal actually masks that of bilirubin, so you typically need to separate the blood components to get a clear signal,” Tan said. “People usually use a centrifuge to do that, and performing the separation on paper has been a challenge.”
The team hopes to have a complete working prototype assembled for this Thursday’s Engineering Design Showcase, and they are still compiling results about the accuracy of the tests. They’ll also go for another award later this month in Washington, D.C., as one of 10 finalists selected to compete in this year’s American Society of Mechanical Engineers Innovation Showcase, or IShow.
Rice freshman engineering students with their Special Olympian. From left: Austin James, Krista Bouchard and her daughter Macy, Mickyle Stanbury, Kylie Balotin and Kelsey Nanneman. Photo by Jeff Fitlow
A 10-year-old Special Olympian is able to work her way along a balance beam without a helping human hand; an assistive device from a crew of Rice University freshmen gave her the independence she so desired.
Macy Bouchard has been working with Rice engineering students to test a device that allows her to compete in one of her favorite events without having to depend on an instructor to guide her. The Houston girl’s global development delays and blindness in one eye do not keep her from competing in gymnastics or dampen her desire to do so under her own power.
The students undefined bioengineering majors Kylie Balotin and Kelsey Nanneman, chemical and biological engineering major Mickyle Stanbury and mechanical engineering major Austin James undefined were drawn to Bouchard’s aid as part of their freshman engineering design class. The class is overseen by Ann Saterbak, a Rice professor in the practice of bioengineering education, who is advising the team with Rice bioengineering lecturer Renata Ramos.
Saterbak’s experience with own her child led her to believe Rice students could help others at Biron Gymnastics, a West Houston gym that specializes in training Special Olympians. In fact, Saterbak’s daughter Miriam, who has Down syndrome, came up with the idea to build a device for teammate Bouchard.
Macy Bouchard works with the walker as she solos on the balance beam. Photo by Jeff Fitlow
“Last summer, Miriam and I were brainstorming projects for her Girl Scout Silver Award, and she wanted to help her teammates in Special Olympics,” Saterbak said. “It was her idea to create the device because she wanted Macy to be independent.”
Bouchard and her parents, Krista and Butch Bouchard, were glad to have the help when the engineering team formed in January.
“Special Olympics is for kids with cognitive disabilities, and a lot of them don’t have the physical disabilities that Macy has,” her mom said. “On the beam, she has the most physical disabilities of anyone I’ve seen compete.”
The device the Rice students created is a modified walker with a rectangular PVC frame and special wheels. Bouchard holds the frame while balancing, and the wheels allow her to keep a steady, straight line as she walks the low beam. “She is far less independent on the balance beam than on the other three apparatuses,” James said. “For the beam, she had to be helped quite a bit. We were tasked with coming up with a device that allows Macy to be independent during her balance beam routine.”
The team settled upon the walker-based design after brainstorming “some really crazy ideas, like floating her using wires from above,” Stanbury said.
“A walker is something she’s actually used,” James added.
“There was a question of whether or not the walker was going to work on the mats or whether it was going to slip away from her,” Nanneman said of their first trial with Bouchard in late March. “When she said she loved it, immediately all the work we’d done was worth it.”
The freshman engineering course gives students two months to actually build; the students are put through extensive brainstorming and planning before they are set loose at Rice’s Oshman Engineering Design Kitchen, where they have the resources at hand to finish their prototypes.
Rice engineering students work with Special Olympian Macy Bouchard as she tests the latest prototype of a walker that gives her more independence for the balance beam event. The students, from left, are Mickyle Stanbury, Kelsey Nanneman, Kylie Balotin and Austin James. Photo by Jeff Fitlow
The team started with two standard walkers and added wheels and the frame, as well as side wheels that kept the prototypes from snagging on the low beam while Macy moved forward, backward and from side to side during her routine.
“Initially, the walker was supposed to be adjustable for all balance beams, but the more we thought about it, if someone needed this much help, they weren’t going to be working on the higher balance beams anyway,” Nanneman said.
In working with the girl, the students found they had to adjust the size of the frame for Bouchard’s reach and discovered their original wheels were prone to stalling where two gym mats met. They plan to install balloon-type wheels from Wheeleez, a team sponsor, before their final presentation near the end of the school year.
Ultimately, the device will remain at the gym, where Bouchard and other youngsters can use it to advance their skills. “I don’t think of it as therapy, but I think of it as giving the same benefit that therapy provides,” Krista Bouchard said. “There’s a kind of a movement to not have your kid in therapy all the time, because they miss out so much. One of the things I love, love, love about this is the interaction between the kids.”
As for the team members, who will show their work at the annual George R. Brown School of Engineering Design Showcase April 17, getting a good grade on the project is almost a secondary consideration. “I like seeing Macy’s big smile when she jumps off the beam and holds her hands up,” Balotin said. “She seems so happy.”
Students at the 2013 Design Showcase demonstrate their inventions. Photo by Jeff Fitlow
The Rice University community and the public are invited to see scores of student inventions at the annual Brown School of Engineering Design Showcase April 17 at Tudor Fieldhouse.
The free event will be open to the public at 4:30 p.m., with awards in 14 categories to be announced at 6:30 p.m. Rice engineering alumni and representatives of local industry will judge the teams. The top prize for excellence in engineering will earn the winning team $5,000.
The event will also feature the presentation of the Willy Revolution Award for Innovation in Engineering Design, a $5,000 prize founded by the Rice alumni who famously turned the statue of William Marsh Rice in 1988.
More than 80 teams will demonstrate devices and show designs for projects with biomedical, mechanical, computer, chemical and flight applications, among others. See the complete list of showcase teams at the Oshman Engineering Design Kitchen site, here.
Watch a video from the 2013 showcase below.
Since the first of the year, the Rice Robotics Club has won second place in two robotics competitions, and in one of them, outdid teams with members already working for engineering companies.
“Yeah, we came in second, but the main point is that we’re students and we beat a bunch of professionals. We’re pretty proud of that,” said Paul Chaguine of the Robot in 3 Days competition, held Jan. 4-8 in the Ryon Engineering Laboratory on the Rice campus. Chaguine, a senior in chemical engineering and an engineering intern at Weatherford International, is president of the Rice Robotics Club.
Chaguine’s group, Team O-RYON, was made up of students from Rice, Stanford, Arizona State and Johns Hopkins universities, and the Webb Institute, an engineering college in Glen Cove, N.Y. They competed against teams of professional robotic engineers from such companies as AndyMark, iRobot, and iRCreative.
On Jan. 11, Chaguine and four other students took second place in the VEX-U competition held in Tahlequah, Okla. They competed against teams from the University of Texas at Austin, Oklahoma Christian University and Northeastern State University in Oklahoma.
On the team with Chaguine were Teju Kishore, a sophomore in chemical engineering, and Jose Avalos and Prudhvi Boyapalli, both freshmen, all from Rice, and Harry Craig, a junor in structural engineering at the University of Houston-Downtown. At the same time, teams from 11 elementary schools and 64 high schools competed. The Rice students doubled as referees and helped run the competition software.
“It was a lot of work and a lot of fun helping those younger kids get into the robotics world,” he said.
The Rice Robotics Club was founded in 2008 by Andrew J. Lynch, who earned a master’s degree in mechanical engineering in 2009 and a second master’s in computer science in 2011, both from Rice. He now works for Sparx Engineering in Manvel, Texas.
Lynch organized a robotics club at Lamar High School in Houston, with Chaguine as a member before he graduated in 2010. Chaguine is one of three former high school students who were part of the Lamar Robotics Club and subsequently enrolled at Rice. The other two are Brian Biekman, a senior in psychology, and Nelson Chen, a junior in computer science.
At Lamar, Chaguine enjoyed chemistry and the engineering aspects of the Robotics Club. “So I just combined my favorite subjects and decided to go into chemical engineering,” said Chaguine, whose father, Petr Chaguine, is a research scientist in the physics and astronomy department at Rice.
Chaguine still works with Lamar students during “robot season.” “A lot of kids at Lamar have gone into engineering or something in science because of the Robotics Club. It encourages them in that direction,” he said.
The Rice team’s faculty adviser is James McLurkin, assistant professor of computer science.
—Patrick Kurp, Engineering Communications
Team Brittle Bones took first-place honors Jan. 23 in the fifth annual Rice Undergraduate Elevator Pitch Competition at McNair Hall’s Shell Auditorium. The team won $1,500 for its presentation about the R-ARM, a robotic arm for use by someone with limited mobility. The competition drew engineering teams from the Oshman Engineering Design Kitchen as well as individuals and independent design teams from across campus. Contestants made 90-second presentations about their projects. The pitches described their designs, the problem they were trying to solve, the competitive advantages of their design and the commercial potential of their devices or product. For more information, visit oedk.rice.edu/ep
The winning teams were:
First place -- Brittle Bones. Team members: Nimish Mittal, Matthew Nojoomi and Sergio Gonzalez.
Second place -- ParkiT. Team members: Xin Huang, Jennifer Ding and Chris Ertel.
Third place -- Magic Touch. Team members: Bryan Solomon, Caitlin Makatura, Julie Walker, Mike Schubert and Holly Liang.
Fourth place -- The Molar Express. Team members: Bennie Chang, Emily Bache, Rebecca Lee, Kevin Cheng and Richard Nguyen.
Fifth place -- Hospital in a Toilet. Team members: Abhipray Sahoo, Evan Dougal, Jennifer Ding, Minyang Ma, Chenxin Fu and Christopher Buck.
Most investable -- The Molar Express. Team members: Bennie Chang, Emily Bache, Rebecca Lee, Kevin Cheng and Richard Nguyen.
Thanks to a gift from Al J. Hirshberg ’82, ’83 and his wife, Suzy ’84, the machine shop in the Oshman Engineering Design Kitchen is even better equipped for students working on design projects.
“These machines are state-of-the-art. When they’re building a prototype, the students will get a chance to use the same kind of tools they’re using in industry,” said Joe Gesenhues, the OEDK’s machine shop manager.
Already installed in the machine shop is a CNC (Computer Numerical Control) plasma cutting table, used for cutting, routing and engraving metal. A plasma cutter sends pressurized gas through a small channel fitted with a negatively charged electrode. When the electrode is charged and the tip of the nozzle touches metal, the connection creates a circuit. The resulting spark heats the pressurized gas until it reaches the plasma state at temperatures as high as 25,000 degrees F.
“They tell us we can go through a one-inch steel plate like nothing. We haven’t tried that yet,” Gesenhues said.
Awaiting installation is a three-axis cutter, or milling machine, which can manufacture parts out of metal or other materials. The new equipment supplements the lathes, drill presses, vertical mills, band saw, grinders, buffers, and compressed air and specialty tools already in use in the machine shop.
Hirshberg is executive vice president of technology and projects at ConocoPhillips with 28 years of experience in the oil and natural gas industry. He earned B.S. and master’s degrees in mechanical engineering from Rice. Suzy Hirshberg earned a B.A. in economics from Rice.
The machines were set up by Danny Blacker, the OEDK’s engineering design technician.
-- Patrick Kurp, Engineering Communications
A team of six Rice University engineering students took their first project undefined the design of a rack to transport three bicycles at a time via METRO bus undefined all the way to its logical conclusion and have won this year’s Texas Department of Transportation’s College Challenge.
TxDOT College Challenge winners, from left: Sharon Ghelman, Annabelle McIntire-Gavlick, Kivani Sanchez, Brian Barr, Kenny Groszman and Max Hasbrouck.
Now they’re starting the second half of their freshman year.
The team undefined bioengineering students Ken Groszman and Sharon Ghelman, mechanical engineering students Max Hasbrouck and Annabelle McIntire-Gavlick and chemical and biomolecular engineering students Kivini Sanchez and Brian Barr undefined took the $3,000 top prize with a presentation at the ninth annual Texas Transportation Forum in San Antonio Jan. 8.
The team was one of three finalists asked to develop innovative concepts that address the state’s mobility, connectivity and transportation safety issues. The other finalists were from the University of Houston and Austin College.
The students were motivated by a recent study by the Houston-Galveston Area Council that anticipates the region’s growth will make racks that can hold two bikes on current METRO buses insufficient to meet the needs of commuters. In fact, this week’s news is a double win for Rice, as the three-rack solution was one of several recommendations by a Houston Action Research Team (HART) of undergraduates who worked over the summer to help METRO improve bike-bus transit in the city.
“Ridership is up significantly systemwide, and people want METRO to solve the ‘last-mile’ problem,” said Matthew Wettergreen, a lecturer at Rice’s George R. Brown School of Engineering who works with freshman design teams at the Oshman Engineering Design Kitchen (OEDK). “You can get almost anywhere in Houston on the buses and trains, but that ‘last mile’ to and from your destination requires you to either drive or walk. Bikes are a great way to solve that problem, but there’s a limited number of bike racks on METRO rail and buses.”
He said three-bike racks from METRO’s current vendor wouldn’t work because of the buses’ windshield design. Folded up when not in use, the racks would impede the driver’s view.
An illustration from the Rice team's contest entry shows details of their three-bike rack. Click to view a larger version.
The contest required students to submit a project proposal and a video. It didn’t require them to actually build the project.
“One of the judges commented on that,” McIntire-Gavlick said. “He said, ‘It’s a good day when an engineer actually gets his hands dirty.’ I think they really appreciated the fact that we put so much time into this and that we have a working prototype to show all of our efforts. We had done testing on our prototype, too.”
The rack would take only a little more space than a two-bike unit when folded up because the spring-loaded unit for the third bike is collapsible. A rider would load it up by pulling a handle that allows the third rack to slide out. The wheels sit in a strap-supported channel and an arm extends over the front wheel to lock the bike into place.
The prototype cost less than $900 to build at the OEDK, and the students figure it would easily meet METRO’s cost requirement of roughly $1,100 per unit when scaled up for manufacturing.
The project’s future is now in METRO’s hands. “We discussed this with them at the end of last semester and the conclusion was that they’re going to spread the idea around the department,” Groszman said. “Hopefully, it will either be passed on to a design engineer to look into manufacturing or a different design team at Rice that can continue testing.”
The students manufactured a fully functional prototype of the slide-out rack for testing.
The students took on the task at the dawn of their academic careers at Rice. “What’s remarkable is that they had no experience manufacturing anything,” said Wettergreen, who got the pitch from Elizabeth Vann, director of civic research and design at Rice’s Center for Civic Leadership, based on the HART team’s proposal.
Vann and Robert Stein, Rice’s Lena Goldman Professor of Political Science, advised the HART team of biochemistry and cell biology student Skye Kelty, civil engineering students Maria Rangel and Laura Lopez and architecture student Austin Jarvis, all seniors. Over the summer they worked on their proposal to METRO and challenged the Engineering 120 class to come up with a three-bike rack in the fall.
“It was an especially challenging engineering project for freshmen,” Vann said. “In the beginning, I wondered if they were going to be able to pull this off. METRO had a lot of special requirements and demands in terms of cost, size, durability and function, so it was a lot to take on.
“But as the weeks went on, I could see they were making real progress. By the end it was just fantastic.”
That the Rice freshmen entered the TxDOT challenge at all was just good luck. “One of our teammates happened to see a flyer for the contest posted at the OEDK and said, ‘Hey, guys, we should enter this,’” McIntire-Gavlick recalled. “It was real last-minute. Then we made the finals and said, ‘Wow, let’s put some more work into this and see what happens.’”
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Oshman Engineering Design KitchenRice University
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Phone: 713.348.OEDK
Email: oedk@rice.edu