Her name is Amy, and even before she starts racing underwater, she’s already created a sea change in how a submarine student team at the University of Waterloo see the potential of engineering to pursue innovation.
Waterloo’s Physical Activities Complex (PAC) swapped sports for robotics, hosting the twelfth Waterloo FIRST Robotics Waterloo Regional Competition over the April 1st weekend.
Most parents are probably happy if their children graduate from university and get a job, but since Armen Bakirtzian (BASc ’08 Mechatronics) left the University of Waterloo’s mechatronics engineering department he has managed to co-found a company that could improve hip replacement surgery all over the world, helping untold numbers of surgeons — including his own father.
John McPhee thought it would be easy to design a device to give Canada’s competitive wheelchair curlers better control of their shots.
Eighteen months and seven prototypes later, he doesn’t mind admitting it hasn’t been easy at all.
The surprisingly complex problem has so far required hundreds of hours of work by McPhee, a systems design engineering professor at the University of Waterloo, and four of his students.
“When Team Canada described it to me, I thought ‘how hard can it be?’” he said. “It turns out it was very, very difficult.”
Construction of the Faculty of Engineering's new Engineering 7 (E7) building began at a ground-breaking event that included robots, autonomous vehicles and good old-fashioned shovels.
About a year ago, several news outlets published stories with playful headlines that included “Static electricity helps geckos get a grip,” and “Shocking! Geckos use static electricity to stick to walls.” The discovery by researchers at the University of Waterloo behind all those stories, however, has much bigger implications that could include breakthroughs in everything from art restoration to car tires to medical applications such as promoting wound healing.
Coming from a family of engineers, Pascale Walters knew that Waterloo was her first choice for engineering, but picking a discipline wasn’t easy. She liked physics, kinesiology, mechatronics engineering and systems design engineering. Walters wasn’t sure how she would decide — until she came across Waterloo’s new biomedical engineering undergraduate program.
Voltera V-One, a custom circuit board printer developed by University of Waterloo engineering students, has taken top prize in the International James Dyson Award competition - beating out a record 710 entries from 20 countries.
When people started putting mannequins in the backs of their cars to try and sneak onto HOV lanes during the Pan Am Games in Toronto, it was an extreme example of how desperate we can become when faced with major traffic congestion. It was also proof that Miovision’s potential solution to transportation management couldn’t come at a better time.