On the morning of March 22nd, the Senior Design Review for the ZJUI class of 2021 was held in the Engineering building. This Senior Design Review involved 105 fourth-year students majoring in Computer, Electrical, and Mechanical Engineering. In addition, 9 ZJUI and UIUC faculty members were available in-person or online to evaluate and offer guidance regarding the plans and progress for each project.

Each of the 27 project teams had 20 minutes to give their presentation, followed by 10 minutes to defend their design choices in a Q&A session. They presented their project topic, solution, technical direction, success criteria, progress, and follow-up plans. Furthermore, they explained the engineering challenges associated with their project and proposed innovative solutions. The faculty members also raised questions concerning each team’s objectives, high-level project requirements, and team schedule, as well as providing suggestions and overall criticisms.

Compared to the traditional senior design course at UIUC, the groups at ZJUI are interdisciplinary and have student members that span engineering disciplines. This is yet another example where ZJUI advocates a global innovative engineering education system featuring cross-disciplinary convergence. The hope is that this interaction and collaboration between different programs fosters more creative ideas, a wider vision in the field of engineering, and more comprehensive solutions.

Some student teams found inspiration from observing challenges facing students on campus and have investigated Seat U: Sensing System for Real-time Library Seat Occupation Detection, Sensor-based Automatic Delivery Vehicle, An Engineering Solution to Auto Chess Set, Wireless Charing Table Supporting Multiple Devices with Arbitrary Placement, and other projects. Other students focused on the care of disadvantaged groups and taking social responsibility. Thus, they have studied A Wearable Device Outputting Scene Text For Blind People, An EMG-Controlled Robotic Glove for Rehabilitation, Camera-based Augmented Reality Endoscope Auxiliary System, A crowd-sourcing urban air quality monitoring system with bikes, and other projects. Still other students challenged the frontiers to provide ZJUI solutions to engineering problems. Therefore, they have explored Radar Object Detection Model for Autonomous Driving, Integrated Synthetic Aperture Radar Remote Sensing System on UAV, Keebot, a humanoid robot performing 3D pose imitation, Augmented Reality and Virtual Reality for Electromagnetics Education, Unsupervised Representation Learning in 3D Medical Image and other projects. Overall, students demonstrated their confidence, fluent English, and defense skills with graceful presentations, fully demonstrating the talent of ZJUI students.

The student efforts met with the faculty’s approbation. The senior design course staff and other ZJUI faculty look forward to students’ further developments and completed project designs.

△ ZJUI faculty participated in the Design Review

△ UIUC faculty participated in the Design Review online