News

What some say could be the future of public transportation in Whitby has a top speed of 20 kilometres per hour. For safety reasons, that’s as fast as the new eight-seater driverless vehicle will be travelling when they start transporting their first passengers. The six-kilometer route, which the vehicle will follow, is said to be the longest AV circuit in Canada to date and will be in use within the next few weeks.

Congratulations to Arash Arami for being selected as one of the keynote speakers at the International Congress of Canadian Society for Mechanical Engineering (CSME 2021). The CSME 2021 lasts for three days long, starting on June 28th to the 30th.

This past Wednesday April 7th, at the Norman Esch pitch competition, a pitch competition amongst the entire UWaterloo Engineering faculty, 4 of the 6 ten-thousand dollar prizes were awarded to teams from the MME department (2 Mechanical, 2 Mechatronics). Mechanical engineering team, Bless Your Sole, earned an additional $3,000 as the winner of the Sedra People’s Choice Award.

Take a brief look at each of our winning teams below:

On March 17, 2021, the Mechanical and Mechatronics Engineering community gathered together to celebrate and learn about the innovative research taking place in the department at the 4th annual MME Graduate Research Symposium.

With the largest attendance to date, this event had many other “firsts”. It was the first time the event was held online, the first collaboration and sponsorship from the Conrad School of Entrepreneurship and Business and featured the first ever entrepreneurship award.

AquaSensing, a tech startup started by MME professor Norman Zhou and ECE professor George Shaker, have earned a spot in the finals of an international pitch competition for water innovation.

The duo booked its spot in the global Water Dragons pitch competition after winning second place in the preliminal round against eight other companies.

Team AquaSensing, a MME student-run start-up project, have won a $5000 grant, among four winning teams, from the 2021 Winter Concept pitch competition.

Founded by MME master's students, Nathan Johnson, Connor Al-Joundi, Kushant Patel and Jarren Teo, AquaSensing focusses on the design of battery-free water-leak detection devices.

Waterloo Autonomous Racing (WATORACE), including two Mechatronics students, Ben Kurrek and Elijah O’Leary, won 4th place in the Indy Autonomous Challenge (IAC) virtual race #3, also capturing the Rising Star Award.

Ben and Elijah have contributed to determining the best racing line for the car to follow, as well as the throttle controller and test scenarios.

A self-driving shuttle bus - the first at any academic institution in Canada - could be operating on the Ring Road at the University of Waterloo by the time students return to campus for in-person classes as COVID-19 restrictions ease.

MME Professor and Executive Director of the Waterloo Institute for Nanotechnology,Sushanta K. Mitra and Kiran Raj Melayil, a Post Doctoral Fellow at the Micro Nano-Scale Transport Lab, are working toward a better understanding of droplet dynamics on face masks to gain insight into the transmission mechanics of COVID-19. Their research is a promising step toward safer and more effective face mask designs for the public.