Capstone Project in Switzerland

Ruth Canahuire, Coordinator of Mechatronics Engineering at UTEC, together with 3 students from the Electronic Engineering career, traveled to Switzerland to present their autonomous robot project to the Lenze industry.

The German company Lenze, dedicated to the automatization of systems in movement, requested students of Purdue University the design and implementation of an autonomous omnidirectional mobile robot that allows the location and displacement of objects within the industry. 

Students Nishant Jain and Duncan Isbister from Purdue joined Joao Fabián, Eddy Denegri and Christian Monterrey from UTEC and, together with Frederik Dankelmann and Dominik Schaller from the University from Lucerne in Switzerland, distributed the tasks and phases for this project. This multicultural team was responsible for the implementation of the robot’s autonomy. 

In Ruth Canahuire’s words “this experience has been more than gratifying because the students were able to to apply their knowledge into a real life problem and in one of the leading countries in automatization such as Germany. In addition, working together with a multicultural team has been very enriching for all of us since we learned other work methodologies”.

The interesting thing about this collaborative and multicultural work was that they managed to overcome the distance factor by taking advantage of technology. Thanks to this, they had constant meetings via webex, as well as follow-ups via e-mail and social networks. They also had technical advisors from the company, which allowed them to have a better view of the company’s needs and develop the robot properly.

Read more about the students’ experience:

Joao Fabián, Student of Electronic Engineering at UTEC

"I could divide the Capstone Project into two parts: development and integration. During the first part, we dealt with challenges such as planning meetings and presentations, taking into consideration the schedules of our group, made up of people of four different nationalities. Thus, our best allies were the online tools that allowed us to communicate, share progress and make modifications directly in the cloud. On the other hand, the final part of the project allowed us to meet the people we had only seen through a screen, receive feedback from advisers from the different institutions that make up the project, and implement the work of months, in just two weeks . Definitely, it gave me a different perspective of teamwork.”

Eddy Denegri, Student of Electronic Engineering at UTEC

"Being integrated into the Capstone Project allowed me to put into practice my knowledge and soft skills learned at university. In addition, I learned to have a good relationship with my colleagues working in teams with students who have different way of doing things and educational culture.”