European Unis Triumph At NI Graphic DesignAwards

There was also a glimpse of the future of engineering excellence at the Student Design Awards.

Andrew Clegg, Industrial Systems and Control, collected the award for Advanced Control Systems, with the use of LabVIEW and CompactRIO to control a hydraulic motion-compensated gangway to improve the safety access to offshore wind turbines. The UK company also collected the Application of the Year Award later in the evening.

Other award categories were Advanced Research (won by Dr Johannes Gutleber, CERN), Automated Test, Education, Energy, Life Sciences, RF and Communications, Structural and Physical Test and Monitoring and Transportation.

There were also awards from the sponsors, Xilinx’s All Programmable Innovation, Intel’s Intelligent System Award and Popular Science Magazine’s Editor Choice, the Humanitarian Award, Green Engineering, NI Community’s Choice and the NI LabVIEW Student Design Award.

This last category was won by Technical University Munich for the CERESS (Compatible and Exendable REXUS Experiment Support For buS), a support system for experiments on sounding rockets in the REXUS programme performed by DLR (German Aerospace Centre) and SNSB (Swedish National Space Board). Its on-board data handling, command and control, real-time communication and interface with the REXUS system on the rocket and on the ground allow students to perform scientific experiments on-board sounding rockets.

The runner up was a team from UK universities, Leeds and Manchester. Their ARTEMIS (Autonomous Robotic Technology Enabling Minimally Invasive Surgery) project to create an endoscopic device that could remain in the gastrointestinal tract to monitoring contents of the stomach. The teams worked on a device similar to a gastric balloon, used in obesity treatments but without the disadvantages of erosion of the stomach wall and stomach ulcers caused by prolonged contact with the stomach wall. A device that could be swallowed would negate the need for surgical procedures, which in itself poses a higher risk to obese patients. The team’s miniature robot uses a pump and valve system controlled by a wireless communications and power to inflate and deflate a gastric balloon. Although larger than practical to date, the project has set the benchmarks for further work to create a workable robotic capsule.

Ruth Coe represented Leeds University to collect the award with Joseph Northwood of Manchester University. Coe graduated this summer in medical engineering and Northwood graduated in electrical and electronic engineering.

Leeds is known for its bio-medical and mechanical engineering while Manchester is renowned for its electrical and system engineering. The students used Skype call and emails and one visit to each other’s campus to pool research and data at each stage, before continuing their respective part of the project, ready for a further update. As Coe observed: It is how engineering work is carried out all over the world, and good preparation for their future careers.

For Coe, this will be a PHD in medical engineering, possibly staying in robotic research, possibly regenerative medicine or soft tissue engineering, while Northwood is joining the National Grid graduate scheme and will be using electrical engineering skills for asset integrity to improve the grid infrastructure.

The pair, who represented the 12 other students and four supervisors in the project’s teams, were genuinely enthusiastic about NI Week and the opportunity to see how others were using LabView and other NI equipment. But it was not a case of all work and no play - they also revealed detailed plans to celebrate their achievement on Austin’s Sixth Street!