Better Packing System for Rockets Tops Spring Capstone Design Expo

Students showcase devices to help children with autism, improve gorilla feeding at zoos, and even sort Lego bricks.

By: Joshua Stewart (jstewart@gatech.edu)

Photos: Candler Hobbs, Andre Magyar

Tuesday, 25 April 2023

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group of winning students and faculty with oversized check and Buzz mascot

Team 12, a group of industrial engineers, won the overall prize at the Spring Capstone Design Expo.

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One of the most challenging parts of any journey is packing. Turns out, that’s true whether you’re loading the car for a trip to the beach or packing cargo headed for the International Space Station (ISS).

For Axiom Space, loading a rocket is a process that begins with months of planning and organizing before the first items are put onboard. It’s a unique challenge that draws on the years of experience of the two people principally charged with packing. And it needs to speed up to accommodate the company’s plans for more frequent launches in the years to come.

students standing next to a poster, talking to one another

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A look at more projects and teams from the Expo.

A team of industrial and systems engineering students developed a tool to speed packing for Axiom, documenting the years of nuanced knowledge from the human packers and translating it into data that can be used in ground-logistics software to optimize the process. Their approach took top prize at the Spring 2023 Capstone Design Expo April 25.

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190

Teams

Schools from 3 Colleges

$13.5K

prize money

three female students working with a splint suspended on a device

Team Splintstones created a splint to prevent self-injurious behavior exhibited by children with autism.

man wearing wrist-mounted device touching eye

Eye.See.U is a device that helps people with tetraplegia safely insert and remove contact lenses.

people looking at a camera device on a table

SwimOptics analyzes swimming strokes using an underwater intelligent tracking system.

Their reaction after they learned judges rated them the best overall project?

“We’re absolutely over the moon,” team member Alec Russin said, without a hint of irony.

“I’m on a different planet right now,” Andrew Jarcik added quickly.

Despite their surprise at earning the top spot, the group was excited about the potential efficiencies they developed for Axiom.

“First, our solution is able to replicate the way that the humans manually pack,” Russin said. “And second, we made it better, saving astronauts 50% of the time needed to unpack the spaceship. That's time that they now have back to do other stuff.”

And at an estimated $130,000-per-hour cost for astronaut time, the impact is significant.

The same kind of innovation and impact was on display throughout McCamish Pavilion and the parking lot outside, where more than 190 student teams showed off the results of their semester-long senior design projects. Prizes went to the top team in each of the nine Georgia Tech schools represented at the event, along with the best interdisciplinary project and the best overall.

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group of students surrounding a bucket of food hanging from a pole

Monkey Business developed a feeding device for Zoo Atlanta and tree-dwelling monkeys.

students and a child demonstrate a device that sorts Lego bricks

BrickBox is an automated Lego brick sorting machine.

Robo Graffiti mimics painting strokes and assists in painting building murals.

a closeup view of Lego bricks in a sorting device

A close-up of a Lego brick falling onto the BrickBox conveyor belt.

The interdisciplinary award went to a team that created a baseball swing training device that makes practice more engaging and entertaining for children three to six years old.

The top project from the School of Music created an approach for concert venues to help them accommodate guests with auditory processing challenges.

From the School of Materials Science and Engineering, the winning team designed graphene supercapacitors using a new material from a startup.

From the George W. Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering, it was a machine that improves the currently manual process of knocking out laser-cut parts from a metal sheet.

The Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering produced two top projects: One developed an implant to administer cell therapies for brain tumors; the other designed a gauge to help surgeons determine the correct screw length to repair a broken jaw and minimize post-surgery complications.

See all the winners from Capstone Expo below and visit expo.gatech.edu for more projects.