The Rose Show made a triumphant return to campus this spring, after nearly a 20-year hiatus, as a showcase for ingenuity, creativity and problem solving by students who will be tomorrow’s leaders in science, engineering and mathematics.

More than 80 projects completed this school year by first-year students through seniors in several academic areas were featured this year. Representatives from industry judged student projects and to pitch possible future project ideas.

Rose-Hulman’s version of a World’s Fair, The Rose Show was a biennial event that was a popular campus and community occasion, attracting thousands of visitors. The first show in 1927 was attended by 3,486 people, according to published reports, and the event reached its peak with 6,765 people visiting exhibits in 1932.

The school newspaper, The Technic, described the 1934 show as “one of the most important events in school history,” in part because it required students to plan, organize and execute the event, and answer questions from the public about their presentations.

This year, the four projects judged to be Best of Show were:

• An iPhone application that collects and models patient data undergoing knee rehabilitation. Senior mechanical engineering majors Joseph Callahan, Matthew Peterson and Stephen Schueth investigated a correlation between Emovi’s KneeKG data and the iPhone data. The data from the iPhone allows Emovi to remotely measure certain knee gait parameters to supplement the data collected from the KneeKG device.

• Mechanical engineering seniors Cameron Sickbert and Mitchell Lozier developed an emergency response unmanned aerial vehicle that can assist first responders in emergency situations. The device is a drone (with five double propellers) that also flies like a plane (with retractable wings) to get to long-distance situations. The project earned first-place honors in the undergraduate category at the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics regional student conference, and team members will now make a presentation at the national conference this fall.

• Senior biomedical engineering students Camille Blaisdell, Lindsey Fagerberg, Ellese Petty and Becca Poppel designed and constructed a new table and hand tool that will assist employees at Goodwill of Central and Southern Indiana increase the efficiency and ergonomics of an air mattress manufacturing process. The products feature a height adjustability mechanism in the table, a custom tabletop, removable funnel and a multi-purpose hand tool.  

• An innovative computer software solution for ground-based trade space exploration and optimization of radar systems was developed for Northrop Grumman Corporation by senior electrical engineering students Brandon Hull and Jonathan Moore, along with senior computer engineering and physics double-major Luke Kuza. The process allows systems engineers to evaluate system-level trade-offs and optimization for key radar performance parameters.

Two other Best of Show projects were completed by electrical and computer engineering teams whose client company prevented them from making public displays because of non-disclosure agreements.

“Everywhere you turned the students’ work was innovative and showed a high degree of professionalism,” said John Bings, an electronics engineer at the Naval Surface Warfare Center at Crane, Ind., who was a judge.

Other companies and organizations having representatives serving as project judges were Appirio, Beckman Coulter, General Electric Company, Launch Terre Haute, LumenCache, Motorola Solutions, Northwestern University’s Master’s Engineering Design Innovation Program, Raytheon, Rockwell Collins, Sazerac Distillery and Texas Instruments.