91ÊÓƵ

At the 2025 , a team of students "walked" their robotics project on a leash down the center of the 91ÊÓƵ Sports & Recreation Center Fieldhouse. A different group strapped on a pair of virtual reality goggles, their joysticks and their project helping other developers have more fun and fewer challenges while creating virtual reality games. Another team toasted their success with the DrinkBot, sipping customized drinks that their client project created, while two more students presented research about how coffee roasts and bean grind sizes affect caffeine content. 

Throughout the fieldhouse, students proudly displayed projects that resulted from months or even years of tireless dedication.  In total, 91ÊÓƵ's collegiate version of the World's Fair brought together more than 130 student projects from nearly every discipline and year, displaying innovation, entrepreneurship, and sustainability.

Some projects sought to make the world easier to navigate for all people. An team created the MediMate, a 3D printed, magnetic pill dispenser more affordable and more accessible than current market options. It is an item that measures up nicely with another project, the multidisciplinary Chef's Accessible Kitchen Equipment (CAKE). CAKE is an open-source kitchen scale with audio cues that integrates with an external recipe app to improve measuring experiences of chefs with visual impairments.

Two teams of students also galloped toward accessibility, working with The Lakeland Center in Coatesville, Indiana, to saddle up model horses. They developed technology to make riding more accessible for individuals with disabilities; a device to measure rein tension and a saddle pad to measure pressure distribution. 

students had transportation in mind as well; they presented their early-stage project of developing an accessible bus map, in conjunction with the City of Terre Haute and ARC of the Wabash Valley.

Residents of Terre Haute may soon see 91ÊÓƵ student impact in other areas of the city, too. students developed a plan to redesign elements of the Vigo County Fairgrounds, while their peers provided much-needed infrastructure rehabilitation to the Terre Town neighborhood. 

Other project teams utilized their skills to create sustainable solutions to problems facing the world. The GREA Plant Tower and the Vertical Garden team both developed their own takes on structures to promote plant growth in confined spaces, while a team worked with reTHink, a local nonprofit dedicated to sustainability, to produce an app to encourage participation in sustainable activities.

Projects promoting education at all levels were also prominent. The ExStream team of senior mechanical engineering majors fabricated an interactive stream table, as well as lesson guides and a maintenance plan, for the Montessori Academy of Terre Haute to teach children about erosion. 

The peal of a buzzer echoed from the team who created an updated buzzer and timer system for use at the MATHCOUNTS competition. Their innovation was awarded runner-up for the William A. Kline Innovation Award, honoring former Dean of Innovation Dr. Bill Kline.

With giant googly eyes, the robot "ROCKO" attracted a large crowd of smiling visitors. Developed by a multidisciplinary team of students, ROCKO is an open-source robotics kit that seeks to close the current gap in educational materials by providing intermediate-level robotics practice.  Mechanical engineering alumnus Bryson Halsey commissioned the ROCKO team, who received the William A. Kline Innovation Award and carried on a legacy begun by Halsey when his won the award in 2023.

"Dr. Kline was one of the first people I met on campus when I toured Rose, and during the years he served as an amazing mentor to myself and others in the BIC," Halsey said. "After his passing and the creation of the innovation award in his honor, I made it my senior year's goal to complete a project worthy of such an award. To see the students I mentored as a capstone client win it as well made me extremely happy." 

The culminations of countless hours of planning and design, this year's Rose Show projects aimed to solve real-world problems. From advancing the scope of knowledge, to creating societal impact, to relieving needs of industry clients, the projects push the boundaries of possibility.

Here are descriptions of this year's award-winning projects:

William A. Kline Innovation Award

(Honoring Former Dean of Innovation)

ROCKO
Multidisciplinary Program
Presenters: Katie Collins, Zoe Edgington, Kiana Fan, Emily Lopane, Ben Williams, Elizabeth Ziemer

ROCKO is a bipedal robotics platform developed with the goal of bridging the gap between introductory robotics educations and graduate-level applications. It is a multi-modal, open-source, and highly expandible device intended to cater to hobbyists, students, and educators. The platform seeks to position itself as an option capable of delivering a flexible experience applicable to undergraduate robotics studies. ROCKO successfully caters to this niche by providing a reliable mechanical system with high-performance electrical hardware, an extensible and production-like software architecture, and capacity for advanced robotics research: bipedal locomotion, vision, and autonomous navigation, all at the attainable price point of 750 USD.

William A. Kline Innovation Award Runner-Up

New MATHCOUNTS Buzzer System
Electrical & Computer Engineering
Presenters: Jacob Rast, Calvin Hamilton, Linus Wise

A game show system intended for use at the Terre Haute and Evansville installments of the annual MATHCOUNTS competition series. The system consists of a center console, controlled by an operator; six red-and-white button box units for contestants to buzz in with; and an external timer unit, which will allow contestants to view the remaining time in a round. The system features light and sound to indicate when a contestant has buzzed in and when the round has ended and has adjustable competition settings, such as the ability to change the length of a round. All operations can also be controlled remotely via a Bluetooth interface.

Red Ribbon Department Awards

Terre Town Rehabilitation Team
Civil & Environmental Engineering
Presenters: Cade Watson, Devin Bredehoft, Jake Gibbs, Eli Silva

The neighborhood of Terre Town has not seen much infrastructure investment over the past couple of decades. The City of Terre Haute would like to reconstruct the roads, which provides the opportunity to implement stormwater management systems and the addition of walkable pathways. Currently, the site has poor roadway conditions and lacks stormwater infrastructure. The client for the Terre Town Rehabilitation Project is Mr. Marcus Maurer, a City Engineer for the City of Terre Haute. The Terre Town Rehabilitation Project is intended to improve the safety and ease of travel for pedestrians in the neighborhood. The project will also provide a plan for updated roadways and stormwater management. The project is located with the streets of E. Haythorne Avenue on the north side, Lafayette Avenue on the east side, Boston Avenue on the south side, and N 13th Street on the west side of the site (Figures A1-1 and A1-2). The design includes the rehabilitation of roadways that include the addition of shoulders for safety, and stormwater management to reduce the risk of flooding in the area. The purpose of this project is to provide the community of Terre Town with safer modes of travel and the addition of stormwater management measures.

BracketOdds
Computer Science & Software Engineering
Presenters: Ariadna Duvall, Abe Gizaw, Kaylee Lane, Canon Maranda

BracketOdds is an engaging website that utilizes a variety of machine learning models to generate March Madness brackets for the men’s and women’s Division I NCAA basketball tournaments. It provides tournament tools and resources for fans, academics, and high school educators on both desktop and mobile devices. Users of this website can interact with the tournament by creating accounts, saving brackets, and viewing leaderboard rankings.

RESOLVE Verifying Compiler
Computer Science & Software Engineering
Presenters: Ash Collins, William Foss, JL Koenig, Aditya Senthilvel

This project focuses on a verifying compiler for the RESOLVE programming language. During the compilation process, a verifying compiler attempts to prove that a code implementation meets its formal specification (i.e., contract) as well as generate an executable. This project seeks to improve existing functionality and enhance verification capabilities. We have added error checking systems to the parsing phase, made a command line interface for a subsystem of the prover to allow user experimentation, and made advancements towards selecting and applying theorems to prove correctness. Future work will involve refining theorem selection and application, as well as potential refactoring of the compiler’s codebase.

GLADOS: General Learning and Automatic Discovery for Operationalizing Science
Computer Science & Software Engineering
Presenters: Bennett Toftner, Brady Veal, Riley Windsor, Zach Johnson

GLADOS started when Dr. Jason Yoder, a CSSE Professor at 91ÊÓƵ, found himself building the same interface for many different computational research projects over his years of research. Wanting to ease and speed up this repeated process, he created GLADOS, which began in 2021 as a senior capstone project, with continuous iterations done by different senior capstone project teams each academic year. As of 2025, the project has reached basic usability, allowing for multiple experiments to be run on the system in parallel, and giving users ways to organize their experiments within the system.

UDP Attenuator Controller
Electrical & Computer Engineering
Presenters: JJ Henderson, Owen Leonard, Henry Nunns, Lucas Tyson

A device that accepts UDP packet inputs and produces the appropriate control signals for the attenuators on the output. In addition to handling control information, the device has the appropriate physical connections for 8 attenuator channels, up to 16 attenuators total. The device also is capable of physical user input on the controller itself via an 18-key keypad and LCD screen. The device has an appropriate user interface on this screen that is intuitive for the attenuator control parameters. The device has its own power management and distribution systems, accepting either DC benchtop power or standard AC wall power.

HN Cell Model Hardware Acceleration
Electrical & Computer Engineering
Presenters: Simar Dhillon, Larissa Krakora, Isaac Towne, Josh Schrock, Ben McDaniel

The HN Cell model is a complex set of differential equations used to model the electrical behavior of a network of neurons in the brain. This model, due to its non-linearity, is difficult for traditional computer architectures to simulate, making it hard for researchers to test new theories pertaining to how large neural networks behave. By using custom lookup tables (LUTs), Ethernet communication, and the open-source Caravel harness for
silicon fabrication, we have designed a custom user space leveraging hardware acceleration and parallelization to assist in more efficiently simulating large neural networks.

Power-Optimized Environmental Awareness Monitor for Tracking Human Presence and Movement
Electrical & Computer Engineering
Presenters: Vineet Ranade, Murari Srinivasan

The Environmental Awareness Monitor (EAM) is an ultra-low-power, edge computation device designed to detect human presence through changes in voice, movement, and pressure. It is built around the MAX32660 microcontroller and features a low-power accelerometer, pressure sensor, and microphone. The system performs step and tilt detection, pressure change sensing, and over 81% accuracy voice activity detection, all while running for over 13 days on a coin cell battery. Designed for use in military training, field missions, and facility monitoring, the EAM enables long-term deployment with little maintenance. This project demonstrates how robust environmental monitoring is possible under strict resource constraints.

The Empowering Flower
Engineering Design
Presenters: Ben Gleason, Abbey Hileman, Mary Sclafani, Molly Townsend

The Empowering Flower is a visual indicator designed for students to inform them of appropriate times to get some sunshine. It utilizes Raspberry Pi Picos to communicate outside temperature and UV data to an indoor computer and mechanical flower. When the temperature and UV index are both within a user-specified comfort range, the flower opens, signaling that conditions outside are comfortable and encouraging the owner to head outside and enjoy the outdoors.

SunFlower
Engineering Design
Presenters: Owen Smith, Ryan D’Aquila, Tristan Stephens, Jacob Tuck

The SunFlower is a portable, sun-tracking solar generator designed to efficiently capture solar energy while maintaining an aesthetic, nature-inspired form factor. It provides clean, renewable energy for outdoor enthusiasts, environmentally conscious individuals, and others in need of off-the-grid power. With its automated tracking system, the SunFlower follows the sun’s movement throughout the day, maximizing energy efficiency.

Accessibility on Modified NK Fitness Landscapes
Mathematics
Presenter: Henry Nunns

The evolutionary fitness of organisms can be related to their genotype by a fitness landscape, often modeled in a simplified form so that properties like the number of local optima can be studied. The most classic model, called NK, imposes many assumptions, such as the independence of all interactions from each other and that all genes are always active. In this project, we have loosened those assumptions and studied how more complex modified NK landscapes affect evolutionary patterns, particularly how correlated interactions and gene regulation increase access to the global optimum genotype.

Automotive Benchmarking Photo Table
Mechanical Engineering
Presenters: Christan Duh, Caleb Lehman, Carter Lindfelt, James Morehouse, Max Wheatley

This project is an automated photo table designed to capture high-quality images of thyssenkrupp steering columns and other automotive parts for benchmarking. It features a laptop-controlled user interface that controls the movement of a prismatic arm assembly for precise vertical and horizontal positioning of the camera. To capture all angles, a tilt
mechanism is used to aim the camera and a rotating plate turns the part for complete imaging. By automating the imaging process, this system enhances efficiency, repeatability, and accuracy in image collection, reducing manual errors and ensuring consistent documentation for future inspection.

Artic Amphibious All Terrain Vehicle – Build Team
Mechanical Engineering
Presenters: Jacob Durenberger, Zachary Yong, Nick Edwards, Sam West

The team designed, modeled, and tested innovative systems for an all-terrain vehicle traversing amphibious and arctic conditions. Using subscale proof-of-concept demonstrations, we aimed to optimize the vehicle’s ingress and egress maneuvers on sloped shorelines. The systems will autonomously regulate the vehicle’s attitude in water and automatically detect wheel slip to redistribute torque across four independent motors, which maximizes vehicle traction in all-terrain situations. By modifying an off-the-shelf
remote-controlled truck chassis and fabricating a representative hull model, we are validating the innovations proposed for the full-scale model designed by a peer modeling team.

Steel Dynamics Coil Bander
Mechanical Engineering
Presenters: Hannah Ponstine, Susan Smucz, Cameron Buckmaster, Liam Fish

Finished steel coils on Steel Dynamics’ (SDI) Galvanizing Line are banded before transportation. This process is currently manual, the operator wraps plastic banding material around the coils, which range up to six feet in diameter. Nearby structures make this an unsafe and tedious process. This team built a banding arch to feed the band around the coil while the operator stays in place. The arch contains the band with a rubber flap until it is pulled free and tightened around the coil. The arch is retractable under the coil and rides on linear rails to move between multiple banding locations.

ExStream Team
Mechanical Engineering
Presenters: Emily Buchta, Cole Chmielewski, Libby Smith, Cate Stauffer
The ExStream Team was tasked with designing a stream table to fit the needs of the Montessori Academy of Terre Haute to teach environmental science topics. We developed a robust and durable stream table to meet the client’s needs of an interactive option for students aged 2-12 years old as an alternative to the more demonstrative market options. Recyclable materials and a closed water loop system met the client’s sustainability goals. Child operable valves ensure student learning independence, following the Montessori’s “follow the child” methodology of teaching. Industry standard sand and filtration ensures our tables matches or exceeds commercial models on the market today.

Battery Workforce Challenge Vibrational Analysis Team
Extracurricular Competition Team
Presenters: Braden Blackburn, DJ Liveris, Jack Martin, Richard Peters, Paul Sofineti

Our team is conducting vibrational analysis on a modular electric vehicle battery pack for the Battery Workforce Challenge. Using ANSYS simulations and physical testing with the ObserVR1000 and tri-axial accelerometers, we aim to identify natural frequencies, shock forces, and fatigue life. We’re verifying the pack’s mechanical integrity under real-world vibration conditions to ensure long-term durability. In addition to our own testing, we support other teams in the competition with any vibration-related concerns that could impact system performance. This project is supported through close collaboration with Vibration Research, Stellantis, Argonne National Laboratory, the U.S. Department of Energy, and PCB Piezotronics.

30LB Combat Robot
Extracurricular Competition Team
Presenters: Zachary Szymkowski, Tristan Heartt, Ethan Harris

Combat robotics is a field of competition robotics where remotely controlled robots destructively fight in 3 minute matches in an enclosed arena. This combat robotics capstone project involves the design and fabrication of 91ÊÓƵ’s first ever 30LB robot with the goal of competing at RoboBrawl, UIUC on April 4th on behalf of the 91ÊÓƵ Combat Robotics team. Our robot, named “Gored”, uses a kinetic energy spinner weapon in order to damage the opponent, and is designed for the weapon to outreach competitors and to maintain high mobility throughout the match. Upon completion of the project, Gored will continue to compete under the direction of future combat robotics team members.

ROCKO
Multidisciplinary Program
Presenters: Katie Collins, Zoe Edgington, Kiana Fan, Emily Lopane, Ben Williams, Elizabeth Ziemer

ROCKO is a bipedal robotics platform developed with the goal of bridging the gap between introductory robotics educations and graduate-level applications. It is a multi-modal, open-source, and highly expandible device intended to cater to hobbyists, students, and educators. The platform seeks to position itself as an option capable of delivering a flexible experience applicable to undergraduate robotics studies. ROCKO successfully caters to this niche by providing a reliable mechanical system with high-performance electrical hardware, an extensible and production-like software architecture, and capacity for advanced robotics research: bipedal locomotion, vision, and autonomous navigation, all at the attainable price point of 750 USD.