Engineering Commons^™

Novelty Ice Cream Assembly Prototype, Mason Sylvester, Logan Williamson, Alvaro Martinez, Adin Gilman-Cohen

Mechanical Engineering

Cool Beans USA is a novelty ice cream startup company founded by Keith Zachow. In the winter of 2022, our team began working with Mr. Zachow to develop a machine to automate parts of the production process for his product. This product consists of two hemispherical ice-cream cone shell halves filled with soft serve ice cream and pressed together. The assembled pods are around the size and shape of a small walnut and are intended to be sold in stores as a frozen finger food. At the time of project inception, this product was in its early stages and was …

Rotating Backing Brush, Caleb Savard, David Dalal, Max Allred, Mathis Weyrich

Mechanical Engineering

In the final steps of GAF’s shingle production process, small asphalt particles called fines are applied. Some fines adhere well to the shingle sheet, while others temporarily stick only to fall off the sheet further down the manufacturing line. As a result, the shingle plant floor is covered in fines that have fallen due to vibrations and gravity. The technicians and engineers at GAF want a cleaner working environment and to potentially reuse the loose fines. We are a senior project team that solved this problem by designing a system to remove and collect loose fines. In this document, the …

Tree Climbing Limb Saw, Andrew E. Bray, Parker Tenney, Drew M. Robles, Aimee T. Chiem

Mechanical Engineering

This document is the comprehensive report for the Tree Climbing Limb Saw Senior Project. The purpose of the Tree Climbing Limb Saw project, completed by mechanical engineers Andrew Bray, Aimee Chiem, Drew Robles, and Parker Tenney, is to remove low-hanging branches (<15 >ft) to prevent forest fires from travelling up into the canopy, where wind can carry embers for miles. An RC car was heavily modified to create a solution for this problem. A chainsaw was also mounted to deal with the cutting part of the problem. Creating a project which aims to solve this problem is a great step …

Eagle Medical Tray Denesting & Debris Removal Process, Nicholas Allen Ungefug, Noah Chavez, Susana Shu-Lin Okhuysen, Michael Augustine Pennington

Industrial and Manufacturing Engineering

Eagle Medical Incorporated is a contract medical device packaging and sterilization company. The company purchases thermoformed medical packaging trays, which maintain the sterility of medical devices, from various manufacturers. To ensure packaging quality and to prevent cleanroom contamination, Eagle Medical inspects and sterilizes each blister tray that they order. This process is an essential non-value-added activity that creates a bottleneck. Cleanroom employees must stop packaging medical devices and attend to the processing of blister trays and packaging solutions. The blister trays arrive at Eagle’s facility in nested stacks. Vibration and movement during shipping further compresses the stacks, which makes separation …

Interactive Lego Girl Scout Arm, Christopher Suzuki, Emi Okuyama, Bryson Shores, Karina Sandoval

Mechanical Engineering

This Senior Project Report document outlines the senior design project for Girl Scouts of California’s Central Coast (GSCCC) led by a team of four Mechanical Engineering students at California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo. The project encompasses the researching, designing, prototyping, and testing of a LEGO robotic arm for the Girl Scouts to learn more about STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics) and provide support to each Girl Scouts cookie sales in their stores. Their goal was to build a LEGO robotic arm that will interact with customers at the Girl Scout stores and promote the girl scouts' interest …

Barker Bird Animatronic Senior Project Report, Marcus Monroe, Nolan Clapp, Ishan Jandaur, Jonathan Ogden

Mechanical Engineering

This document describes how our F71 Senior Design Project team developed a 3D printed, electronic bird that mimics Disneyland’s first animatronic, the Barker Bird. An animatronic is a mechanical puppet that replicates real life movement with robotic parts. Disney’s Barker Bird is a well-known animatronic that replicates a talking macaw with multiple moving systems. The final prototype completed by our team serves as a teaching tool for CAPED (Cal Poly Amusement Park Engineers and Designers) club members that are interested in the field of animated robots.

Mtb Daq - Mountain Bike Data Acquisition System, Theodore J. Philliber, Ronan M. Shaffer, Dylan M. Ruiz, John M. Ringrose

Mechanical Engineering

Mountain bike suspensions systems are set up and tuned based only on qualitative, ‘feeling’-based metrics. The MTB DAQ, sponsored by Dr. Joseph Mello with the Cal Poly Mechanical Engineering Department, is a data acquisition system we developed to improve suspension tuning with a data-driven approach. The system mounts to a bicycle frame and has sensors that measure vibration and travel speed to characterize the bike’s motion. While similar systems exist, they cost in the thousands of dollars range and are very specific to individual bike geometry. Our system was designed to be more affordable to the average rider as well …

Kinetic Energy Harvesting Device For Long Distance Thru-Hikers, Jarod Reece Lyles, Ryan William Mclaughlin, Shaw Hawkeye Hughes, David Hernandez

Mechanical Engineering

The intent of this project was to design and build a device capable of harnessing biomechanical energy from a thru-hiker to charge electronic devices. To begin, we ruled out any potential solutions that could be intrusive to the hiking experience, limiting us to a device that could be placed in a backpack.

After defining the scope of the project, we ideated upon potential designs, and chose to move forward with a rotational generator based design. Detailed analysis included both system dynamics and vibrations based models, and from this analysis we developed a mechanical design in SOLIDWORKS®️ and a custom printed …

Therapeutic Mechanical Horse, Cade M. Liberty, Aleya Dolorfino, Peter Philips, Zuzanna Dominik, Luke Watts

Mechanical Engineering

Jack's Helping Hand and its hippotherapy participants required a device to serve as an alternative to a live horseback riding experience that could also increase the range of riders. This would provide more clients with equine-assisted therapy that has proven to better the lives of people with both physical and mental disabilities. Horses can be unpredictable, tall, and sometimes anxiety-inducing, especially for new riders. Our group’s aim was to develop a mechanical horse that will be able to reduce these issues for equine therapy centers and the riders they help. When a rider gets to practice sitting on the horse …

8 Dof Quadrupedal Hopping Robot, Clayton T. Elwell, John Bennett, Tyler Mccue, Daniel Munic

Mechanical Engineering

The goal of our senior project was to fabricate an eight degree of freedom (DOF) prototypical quadrupedal robot, develop a controller than commands the quadruped to repeatedly jump 10 cm in the air, and fabricate a modular test stand to safely deploy our controller on the quadruped. The creation of a functional quadruped will bring attention to Dr. Siyuan Xing and Charlie Refvem’s research group, Cal Poly Legged Robots, and will give future Cal Poly undergraduate and graduate students a learning tool to explore dynamic control of biomimetic robotic systems.

Over the course of our senior project, we successfully manufactured …

Solar Solution For Mini-Rover, Michaella Ochotorena, Derick Louie, Jonathan Cederquist, Collin Petersen, Cole Korchek

Mechanical Engineering

This project focuses on designing, building, and testing a functional prototype of a collapsible solar array on the mini Mars rover being developed by client and sponsor, Mr. Rich Murray. Although many previous collapsible solar arrays have been deployed for space missions, the previous solar-powered Mars rovers only deployed their arrays once upon landing. This solar array will be able to collapse and deploy multiple times to allow for greater rover mobility and stability when the rover is not charging. This system is critical to the success of the rover project because it provides power without which the rover cannot …

Brush Clearing Trimming Device: Drivetrain, Dallas Russell, Nathan Small, Alex Imbery, Jordan Aguana

Mechanical Engineering

We, the “DT Inc.” team, have been tasked with the redesign of the drivetrain of an electric brush clearing tool created for trail and roadside use. We started the design process by doing research on the currently available products and determining their strengths and shortcomings. We also tested the prototype given to us by our sponsor, and listened to our sponsor about what he liked about his design and what he wanted changed. We resolved from this research that the most important improvements that we needed to make were to improve the traction, reduce the speed and increase the torque, …

Baker/Koob Final Report: Solar Solution For Mini Mars Rover, Jonathan Cederquist, Cole Korchek, Derick Louie, Michaella Ochotorena, Collin Petersen

Mechanical Engineering

This project focused on designing, building, and testing a functional prototype of a collapsible solar array on the mini Mars rover being developed by client and sponsor, Mr. Rich Murray. Although many previous collapsible solar arrays have been deployed for space missions, the previous solar-powered Mars rovers only deployed their arrays once upon landing. This solar array will be able to collapse and deploy multiple times to allow for greater rover mobility and stability when the rover is not charging. This system is critical to the success of the rover project because it provides power without which the rover cannot …

Interactive Lego Girl Scout Arm, Chris Suzuki, Emi Okuyama, Bryson Shores, Karina Sandoval

Mechanical Engineering

This Senior Project Report document outlines the senior design project for Girl Scouts of California’s Central Coast (GSCCC) led by a team of four Mechanical Engineering students at California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo. The project encompasses the researching, designing, prototyping, and testing of a LEGO robotic arm for the Girl Scouts to learn more about STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics) and provide support to each Girl Scouts cookie sales in their stores. Their goal was to build a LEGO robotic arm that will interact with customers at the Girl Scout stores and promote the girl scouts' interest …

Multifamily Complex Smart Locks For Property Management And Tenant Security, April Mills, Allen Chen, Dana Kumamoto, Michael Cook

Mechanical Engineering

Maintaining and managing hundreds of locks and physical keys for an apartment complex can be time consuming and costly, especially when the apartments turn over to new tenants. Our goal was to develop a smart door lock that is compatible with Obodo’s management app for apartment complexes to make accessing apartments secure and simpler for tenants and easier to manage for owners.

We designed and manufactured one smart door lock that is powered with four AA batteries and utilizes a dynamic NFC device and Bluetooth technology. The board can enter a sleep mode which reduces power consumption. The dynamic NFC …

Model-Based Design Of An Optimal Lqg Regulator For A Piezoelectric Actuated Smart Structure Using A High-Precision Laser Interferometry Measurement System, Grant P. Gallagher

Master's Theses

Smart structure control systems commonly use piezoceramic sensors or accelerometers as vibration measurement devices. These measurement devices often produce noisy and/or low-precision signals, which makes it difficult to measure small-amplitude vibrations. Laser interferometry devices pose as an alternative high-precision position measurement method, capable of nanometer-scale resolution. The aim of this research is to utilize a model-based design approach to develop and implement a real-time Linear Quadratic Gaussian (LQG) regulator for a piezoelectric actuated smart structure using a high-precision laser interferometry measurement system to suppress the excitation of vibratory modes.

The analytical model of the smart structure is derived using the …

Cal Poly Fluid Power Vehicle Challenge 2022, Sangmin Sung, Eddy Rodriguez, Travis Welch, Jeremy Baechler, Kevin Pauls

Mechanical Engineering

In this report, the Featherweight Cycles design team puts forth the scope and overview of their design project, discusses background research and competitor analysis, and presents the project’s final design and manufacturing plans. The overall goal of this project is to fabricate and compete in the Fluid Power Vehicle Challenge, hosted by the National Fluid Power Association. To better define the design process, the team researched previous year’s designs from Cal Poly, as well as winning designs from the last two years to form a baseline of knowledge about competing schools’ designs. After researching multiple design paths, Featherweight Cycles chose …

Development Of A Prototype Ball-And-Plate Balancing Platform, Scott J. Mangin

Master's Theses

Ball-and-plate balancing platforms have been utilized throughout academia to further understanding of nonlinearities that can occur when applying control algorithms to nonholonomic and underactuated systems. The objective of this thesis is to build upon an existing ball-and-plate balancing platform used in the Intro to Mechatronics class and create a robust platform system that can be utilized by future students to test various controller designs derived from MATLAB/Simulink®. The ball-and-plate platform design uses a myriad of sensors to track the system components in real time: a resistive touch panel is used to track the position of the ball on the plate, …