WESCOOT
Recently, micromobility services have transformed the way people move. In 2018, over 40 million trips were taken using shared scooters in the U.S. alone. To offer these services, scooter share companies hire an army of contractors to collect, charge and redistribute their scooter fleets each night, a process which is both costly and inefficient. We aim to create a fleet of semi-autonomous scooters, which are able to cluster and redistribute themselves automatically, thereby improving the efficiency of scooter collection, charging and redistribution.
Team members: Conner Currie, Eric Gemnay, Matthew Niedoba, Seamus Johnston
HELPMEHOME
Currently 50 million people worldwide are living with dementia, and there are millions of new cases every year. People with early stage dementia want to retain their freedom to be able to leave their homes alone and return safely. HelpMeHome is a wearable device that allows people to keep track of their loved ones with dementia. Using GPS and cellular technology, HelpMeHome sends information to the user’s phone with the whereabouts of their loved ones and if they are displaying unusual behavior.
Team members: Krisan Murugendran, Kaitlyn McCluskie, Rosa Chen, Amber Ma
HERB REPLACEMENT BOT (HERB)
HeRB is a fully mechanical weed control system designed to replace herbicide spraying as the main weed control method. With an increasing number of cases of herbicide resistant weeds, HeRB offers a mechanical alternative for weed control. HeRB weed control is as effective as herbicides, without the environment and sustainability issues. HeRB is a modular system that is easily mounted to your tractor to perform weeding on row crops.
Team members: Santiago Munera, James Graham-Hu, Sudarsan Ramesh, Kuldeep Panjwani
BUOY.LINK
buoy.link is a scalable self-powered remote water quality monitoring network for tracking lake health over time and predicting environmental risks, allowing for early preventative measures to improve drinking water and promote a more stable aquatic ecosystem.
Team members: Sally Hui, Susan Gao, Dhrumil Parikh, David Perna, Kristine Suarez
LUMETIX
Designed for amateur vloggers and social media enthusiasts, Lumetix is a portable smartphone attachment that performs dynamic lighting adjustment for video recording. By measuring the colour temperature of the scene in real-time and controlling a series of lights used for colour mixing, the device illuminates the user’s face appropriately under various lighting conditions. This produces natural-looking footage with consistent tone and brightness throughout the video even under changing ambient surroundings, which can otherwise be difficult to achieve solely using digital image processing.
Team members: Felicity Chan, Chad Paik, Abdulhameed Naji, Keyan Raahemifar
DESHINGLER ON THE ROOF
Roofing is one of the most dangerous jobs performed in the developed world. We believe it is our moral duty to make it safer for those in the industry. Project DeShingler On The Roof lets a robot system perform the dangerous task of shingle removal while roofers can safely operate from the ground. The robot will navigate the roof, remove shingles, and bring them to a designated waste area.
Team members: Adonis Mansour, Joshua Lee, Jonathan Zablocki, Chun Hang Lau
THE INSTICKERATOR
Reselling books in bulk presents many challenges, not the least of which is dealing with stickers placed on the books for sale purposes that are no longer relevant. As anyone who has tried removing stickers from books before can tell you, removing such stickers manually is time and labour-intensive work. The goal of the Instickerator is thus to automatically remove such unwanted stickers in a fast and efficient manner, requiring little to no human interaction.
Team members: Ian Hink, Andrew Wikkerink, Catherine Fowler, and Graeme Blondon
SPE3D – FAST ADDITIVE MANUFACTURING
The SPE3D project is making FDM 3D printers faster. 3D printing is currently changing the world of manufacturing by allowing for freeform design, low-volume prototyping, and in-house production of parts, but at the cost of either speed or quality. The SPE3D solution characterizes the belt and extruder dynamics with higher order models and uses advanced control techniques to increase printer throughput and quality while decreasing printer cost.
Team members: Chad Bissett, Chris Heinemeyer, Lyle Cheatham, Eric Wong
ROBOPERATION
In medical emergencies, it is not always possible for a surgeon to be physically present in the operating room, whether it is due to distance or amount of setup time. Roboperation aims to provide surgeons an additional option when faced with this situation. Our device is a wearable sleeve that fits over the arm and allows a user’s motion to be tracked and replicated on a remote robotic arm, therefore allowing users to move their arm intuitively instead of having to learn a complex robotic system.
Team members: Adrian Malaran, Shelly Cao, Mitchell Villeneuve, James Jurus
LILYPOD
Lilypod is a compact and easy-to-use module for water monitoring needs. With applications in hydroponics, aquaponics and swimming pools, Lilypod can help ensure the safety and purity of water bodies. Intelligent data analytics will help inform future decisions to keep the world’s water bodies clean and optimally nourished, and in turn optimize the health of all the flora and fauna. It measures insightful parameters of its surrounding environment, collects samples of the water’s pollutants, and performs data analytics in the cloud to produce valuable information.
Team members: Sakib Ar Rahman, Pasindu Kollure, Siddhant Chandgadkar, Jullian Yapeter
ADAPTIVE TOOL FOR CARD HANDLING
Physical impairments, such as arthritis or a lack of dexterity, may prevent individuals from playing traditional card games. Our system enables participation through an intuitive touch screen; a user inputs moves and a modified game table carries out the corresponding actions. This allows for all players to independently enjoy card games, without requiring assistance that would compromise gameplay.
Team members: Heather Bradshaw, Sarah Martin, George Cowan, Ashley Clark
IGNIS
The IGNIS Sparq is a compact wearable solution to predict flashover, a dangerous firefighting scenario. The device uses powerful computer vision and machine learning algorithms to process real-time data gathered from near-field IR and visual cameras mounted to the firefighter’s head and body. This data is formulated into a proprietary Safety Index, which can be relayed seamlessly to the firefighter’s oxygen mask through an easy-to-interpret display. Sparq is the next technological step in augmenting firefighter safety and ensuring that our heroes come home safe.
Team members: Hsuan Ling Chen, Yun-Ha Jung, Ruoyu Jessen Liang, Russell Wong, Yangtian Yan
AIR - AUTOMATIC INHALATION RESUSCITATOR
A bag valve mask is a device used by paramedics to provide ventilation for patients who are not breathing adequately. It has been shown there are inconsistent pumping rates between trained medical professionals, and specific volume requirements that are not being met consistently. AIR is a device that is compact, inexpensive, and capable of delivering consistent breaths to a patient through bag valve mask compressions. The objective is to reduce the amount of medical attention and expertise required to operate a bag valve mask.
Team members: Connor Simmons, Aditya Matam, Brian Mao, Sam Raisbeck
DONUTBOT
Public coffee shops are either closed, understaffed, or sparsely stocked with low-quality donuts during late hours. There is a need to provide sweet-toothed customers with quality, customizable donuts during any time of the day in public spaces, including airports, hospitals, universities, and other similar locations. In collaboration with Progressive Automations, DonutBot aims to solve this issue by decorating high-quality, customized donuts on-the-spot using a robotic arm and an automated controls system, just within a few minutes of creating an order via an iPad user interface.
Team members: Brittney Covach, Biranavi Chandrakumar, Hashem Botma
AFTERSHOCK
Currently, in the NHL, professional spotters in the crowd determine if a player needs to be tested for concussions. This can be controversial because it is based on human perception. The objective is to build an under-helmet device to reduce the number of undetected concussion-level impacts in hockey. The device provides coaches and trainers with historical and real-time data that allows them to make data-driven decisions. The device will constantly be accumulating data points that can be used to facilitate concussion research.
Team members: Cameron Blair, Cameron Drysdale, Marcus Laferriere, Bradley McAllister, Eric Tweedle
TOMAT.IO
Tomat.io is working on the future of agriculture by building a tomato harvesting robot for greenhouses. Currently, there is a labour shortage in agriculture and job vacancies are continuously increasing. Our platform uses computer vision to accurately identify and target ripe tomatoes, coupled with a custom-designed end effector that gently grabs and cuts the tomato off the vine. This enables greenhouse owners to have 24/7 picking of only the finest tomatoes.
Team members: Andrew Constantinescu, Mitch Phillips, Bradley Whitlock, Adam Marchand
UPROOT ROBOTICS
There is an increasing global population to feed but an environmental need to move away from herbicides in high-value crops. UpRoot Robotics is tackling this issue at the intersection of farming and sustainability with a chemical-free, autonomous weeding solution. It is designed to be extendable to different platforms, allowing it to scale to just about any agricultural setting. Modular vision and controls software allow for quick configuration, while the fast and precise actuation of the end-effector ensures effective operation over many different crops.
Team members: Emily Shilton, Aaron Ruby, Eric Murphy-Zaremba, John Webster
SLAP
SLAP. (Slap A Dot) is a smart parking management system that helps drivers find parking spaces more efficiently, and parking management derive more insights into their parking lots. As parking real estate in Canada becomes more scarce and expensive, it becomes more problematic for drivers to find available parking in a timely and energy efficient manner. SLAP. is a low-power, wide-range, non-intrusive solution that uses sensors to detect and report parking occupancy, allowing visualization and optimization of parking usage.
Team members: Hanson Ng, Michael Peet, Kelvin Tezinde, John Hwang
IDENTIFYBRE
Climate change and pollution are two of the biggest challenges the world faces today. A huge contributor to this problem is textile waste. With no efficient and inexpensive methods to sort and recycle textiles, most clothing eventually ends up in our landfills. In 2014, approximately 16 million tons of textile waste was generated in the United States alone. With Identifybre, our team will aim to tackle the sorting portion of this problem by coming up with an inexpensive device that can accurately and efficiently sort different types of textiles.
Team members: Brij Bhavsar, Aaron Hudali, Prabhnoor Sangha, Alessandra Schlums, Scottie Yu
LEAFME
In a world of increasing urbanization and decreasing living space, gardening is becoming more and more difficult. LeafMe allows easy maintenance of indoor plants and comes with a mobile app for remote control. This compact solution provides all the indoor gardening basics, from plant growing guides to water level monitoring. With LeafMe, you'll never have to worry about keeping your plant alive ever again, even when you're away from home.
Team members: Joanna Lou, Yiyang Shi, Ji Qi, Hyunmok Jeong
CATCH ME OUTSIDE
Catch Me Outside is a robotic bouldering safety system designed to empower climbers to safely do outdoor bouldering alone. Traditionally, outdoor bouldering requires climbing partners to constantly drag crash pads below the climber in case of a fall. Catch Me Outside replaces the need for climbing partners with a robot that does the same task. The system uses computer vision to track the position of the climber in the environment. Carrying the crash pad, it then continuously moves to keep itself below the climber.
Team members: Can Cui, Ashley Berger, Sarah Gysbers, Anthony Courville
SPEERO – THE SPEECH THERAPY ROBOT
1% of the global population is impacted by a speech impediment. Upon talking to therapists at the Sound Expression clinic, our team found that therapists manually record when stutters occur during sessions and spend hours annotating audio files. Our team has developed a platform called Speero in order to automatically annotate audio recordings, improve client engagement and track progress. Speero records audio during sessions and tracks when stutters occur using deep learning and displays performance metrics on an online platform for therapists to view.
Team members: Harminder Lall, Kevin Lam, Rahul Mehta, Arnet Tran, Shabab Ayub
WATSIZE: ONLINE CLOTHING FIT RECOMMENDATIONS
Often the size or style of online apparel purchases is not as imagined, resulting in a large number of returns. 40% of all clothing purchased online is returned, resulting in companies losing $62.4 billion annually. WatSize’s goal is to eliminate apparel size ambiguity for online shoppers by providing fit recommendations on apparel websites based on the measurements of the user. The user will connect through their smartphone to a scanning device, which will then obtain the user’s body dimensions.
Team members: Alexander Rathke, Briar Smith, Haven Lau, Ella Rasmussen, Aakash Mali
ROUND RL - REINFORCEMENT LEARNING FOR AUTONOMOUS ROUNDABOUT NAVIGATION
With the autonomous vehicle market projected to reach $556 billion by 2026, navigating roundabouts safely remains an unsolved problem in the industry. Roundabouts mitigate fatal collisions by 90% and improve traffic flow. At Round RL, we are developing reinforcement learning algorithms for autonomous roundabout maneuvering. To establish real-world performance, these algorithms are tested in a scaled city environment and benchmarked against state-of-the-art classical control algorithms developed by our partner researchers and mentors at the University of Waterloo’s Smart Hybrid and Electric Vehicle Systems Lab.
Team members: Kanvardeep Rakhraj, Rohan Agarwal, Umar Bhutta, Nigel Pereira
SMARTSNIPE
SmartSnipe is an advanced version of the hockey shooter tutor. The smart shooting board will have doors that open and close to simulate the open spots that appear around a goalie during real game situations. Sensors will be incorporated that can provide shot analytics to the player, such as shot speed and reaction time. The board will be fitted with a camera module, and the footage will be used to support motion research in sports, such as action recognition and pose estimation.
Team members: Nick Sentjens, Brenden Henriques, Loic James Azzalini, Tomas Bakos Lang, Devon Weinberger
AWAYKE
Waking up in the morning is one of the most difficult tasks to perform in people's daily lives. awayke focuses on improving the overall wake-up experience by stepping away from the conventional alarm clock. awayke is a smart alarm clock in the form of a mat, which is only deactivated by a user stepping on it. The mat also connects to the cloud to provide the user with sleep analytics and an additional incentive in the form of peer-to-peer motivation.
Team members: Andy Tan, David Chau, Brandon Fong, Nicholas Blake
MEDIATED INTERVIEW ROBOT (MIBO)
Currently social workers struggle to obtain sufficient evidence that children are being abused because children are often afraid to open up to adults during interviews, especially in cases with an adult abuser. Without evidence, children are forced to remain in toxic environments. Mibo is a social robotic solution to mediate forensic interviews to ensure the child is comfortable in such environments. This is achieved through a toy-like appearance, gender-neutral voice, vision system to always face the interviewee and actuation of the robot to appear lifelike.
Team members: Michael Stone, Pranav Sharma , Ana Djurkovic
CARAVAL
Current food delivery solutions depend on human couriers to achieve product fulfillment. Caravel aims to provide a self driving alternative for food delivery. Without human couriers, fees for food delivery can be dramatically reduced, further promoting the viability and growth of the industry. Our capstone project focuses on the perception module of an autonomous solution. We implement the necessary vision algorithms for a Toyota Corolla to perform lane following and adaptive cruise control (ACC) autonomously that can later be ported to a specialized hardware platform.
Team members: Richard Li, Oles Andrienko, Wesley Yue, Stephen Jia
JOINT RANGE OF MOTION (JROM) MEASUREMENT DEVICE
Currently, most physiotherapists measure patients range of motion with manual error prone devices like the goniometer. This can result in a false perception of progress, higher treatment cost, and limited diagnosis. Other products on the market provide the hardware but do not have patents or data analysis. The JROM System consists of wearable inertial measurement nodes that transmit data to a centralized software core on the physiotherapist's laptop. The core also uses computer vision to increase accuracy, then visualizes the resulting joint angle and analysis.
Team members: Jordan Slater, Bryan Matzko, and Brennan Koopman
CYCLEVISION
CycleVision aims to improve the safety of cyclists on the road by providing an integrated system that can be added to existing bikes which will enhance their spatial awareness with computer vision. An important component to the CycleVision is the multiple LEDs that provided a blind spot indicator for the user as well as signals to passing and oncoming vehicles for turning and nighttime awareness. CycleVision also provides an app that will show metrics to the user as well as overlay navigation.
Team members: Sergio Rodriguez, Elijah Erb, Alistair Fink, Michael HoSue, Zaki Ahmed
SMART COOKER
Common issues surrounding cooking food items include the effects of undercooking or overcooking it. To avoid those issues, BullsEye Cooking aims to cook food items to a precise and safe temperature. The device consists of sensors to approximate the physical properties of the food item placed inside. Using the properties, cooking time is estimated to achieve the precise internal temperature throughout. BullsEye Cooking precisely controls the cooking conditions and interacts with the consumer through a web-based user interface.
Team members: Yulian Bagnel, Rimpey Diaz, Youssef Roman
BALLR
Ballr aims to provide competitive softball pitchers with a training solution that removes the need for a catcher and easily tracks pitch data. This device will autonomously catch and return a thrown ball back to the pitcher while recording speed and accuracy statistics, enabling pitchers to focus on repetition without relying on a catcher or wasting energy retrieving balls. Easy to set up and disassemble, Ballr is ready to be used both in the backyard and at the ball diamond.
Team members: Joel Ruhland, Caitlin Idziak, Brandon Berchtold
TRACKPOD
Group, wildlife, and astrophotography are limited by the need to setup a camera to capture and track the subject matter. Adjusting camera positions is a manual process that requires constant oversight by a photographer to ensure quality results. TrackPod automates the alignment process between camera and subject by creating a platform that enables selection, tracking, and photography of user-defined subjects accurately and conveniently. With a modular design that features high precision and low latency, TrackPod can be used in formal settings and on the go.
Team members: Devansh Vaid, William Klanac, Julian Pettit, Fernando Yee
MOBIUS
As the usage of laptop computers grows, so too does the amount of people who use them outside of a conventional setting like a desk or table. Unfortunately, the user experience in these scenarios is not always ideal, especially when there is not enough room for a conventional mouse, the typically preferred choice of input device. MoBIUS demonstrates a wearable, motion-based alternative to the touchpad that more closely mimics the operation of a conventional mouse to enhance the user experience.
Team members: Shilpan Shah, Nisarg Bhavsar, Simon Chen, Lawrence Wu
SWAPSTOP
Modern drone swarms have seemingly limitless potential for agricultural surveying, infrastructure inspection, search and rescue, and countless other applications, however; short flight times make sustained operations impractical. SwapStop solves this problem using an autonomous drone battery swapping station that brings continuous drone operations to the skies for the first time. SwapStop features a platform allowing a drone to autonomously land, receive a fresh battery, and take off within a blazing 30 second window. Intelligent power management ensures a fresh battery is always ready to go.
Team members: Will Clark, Will Thibault, Geoff Spielman, Tom Meredith
FOREST AI
Forest AI is aiming to create the first low cost in-vehicle driving scenario collection system of which the primary goal is to enable crowdsourcing as a method of data collection for on-road traffic scenarios. Facilitating this method of data collection will accelerate the validation of self-driving vehicles by providing realistic domain specific driving scenarios at scale which can be used in autonomous vehicle simulation systems to ensure the behavioural competency of self-driving cars. In addition, the scalability of the platform will unlock the massive amount of edge-case driving scenarios of which self-driving cars are inevitably going to encounter on the road. The two-part system is comprised of a user friendly in-vehicle sensor suite in addition to a cloud-based video annotation and data storage system managed by Forest AI.
Team members: Isaac Chang, Tamim Faruk, Khaild Berry, Tianyu Guo
BOLD AND BRASH
With the advent of smartphones and handheld video recording technology, filming sporting events has become increasingly popular. But due to the innate fast nature of sports such as basketball, camera operators struggle with filming fast moving objects accurately and with stability. Bold and Brash is a basketball tracking gimbal that allows any user to interface their smartphone or camera and record while the gimbal accurately tracks the action, so you don’t have to.
Team members: Dhruv Kushalkar, Kalen Saldanha, Sanjay Srinivasan, Mauris Winata
EASYSCAN
Popular 3D scanning methodology can be obscenely expensive for individuals and companies alike. We aim to bring down this cost without compromising the quality of the scan using the increasingly popular technique of photogrammetry. With everyday use in mind, we're designing a low cost product that can be used in manufacturing settings to aid engineers and developers to rapidly prototype their designs.
Team members: Vraj Bhavsar, Siddhant Bhatnagar, Jonathan McGarity-Shipley, Rayhaan Ahmed, Het Shah
ADA BY PUMPED
Ada is a better breast pump designed for working mothers. Innovating on a device that has lacked technological focus in the last 50 years, Ada provides a women-first breast-pumping experience, contrasting current options that are clerical, stressful and uncomfortable. Ada measures milk production in real-time, allowing analysis and personalization to be built on top. Combined with an improved form factor, auto controls, and an application proactively connecting mothers to a community of lactation consultants, Ada empowers mothers to prioritize both their maternal and career choices.
Team members: Emily Cho, Dana Ding, Emma Xie, Shreya Subramaniam
POLLIMATE
Honey bees contribute roughly $20 billion of agricultural pollination value in the US alone and are integral to a majority of ecological systems. Unfortunately, populations have been declining globally since 2006 due to pesticides, disease, and climate change. Pollimate is our design team’s technological alternative solution to animal-mediated pollination. It is a scalable and autonomous aerial solution that is capable of artificially pollinating crops by leveraging computer vision to localise drones and accurately pollinate flowers across a wide variety of plant species.
Team members: Gerard Salisi, Brynn Davis, Justin Wang, Jordan Hu
KIYO ROBOTICS
Kiyo Robotics is building a fully autonomous solution for piece picking in ecommerce order fulfillment and kitting processes. We use state-of-the-art in artificial intelligence to enable highly efficient robotic dexterity capable of grasping millions of different items to reduce costs and decrease delivery times.
Team members: Dar Mehta, Himel Mondal, Nikhil Keswani
TOPCHARGE
Imagine simply charging your phone by setting it down beside your meal. TopCharge is working to make wireless charging mainstream and effortless. Existing wireless charging pads can be inconvenient and are not suited for a public environment. A durable table that automatically detects the location of multiple devices and starts charging them without any user input or interaction will improve customer satisfaction and retention. With the ability to expand into the accessibility market, TopCharge plans to lead the way into the wireless charging revolution.
Team members: Sheiss Husnain, Ria Banerjee, Lucy Lou, Benjamin Korol, Talal Kamran
INNERVISION
Allowing an athlete to return to play too soon after a concussion can lead to permanent damage and increased healing time. InnerVision aims to enhance safety in amateur sports by protecting athletes from the harmful effects of playing while concussed. Combining eye-tracking with cutting-edge biomedical research and machine learning algorithms, our ProSpecs device can quickly provide sports teams with an objective concussion likelihood score without requiring comparison to baseline tests.
Team members: Richard Matthews, Hillary Ngai, Andrea Edwards, Tanner Wing
LIGHTBIKE
Despite improvements in road infrastructure, accidents involving bicycles are ubiquitous. LightBike is a holistic solution that aims to improve communication between cyclists and vehicles, for the purpose of improving cyclist safety. The hardware components include a wearable glove and a mounted hardware module for communicating cyclist intention. There is also an app that is able to relay information while tracking cyclists locations to show them to other motor vehicles in the area. The goal is to reduce the frequency and impact of common vehicular accidents.
Team members: Purav Shah, Diana Jokic, Vignesh Sivan, Mustafa Ismail, Mustafa Shahbaz