Senior Design is a graduation requirement for University of Pennsylvania undergraduate engineering students. Senior Design is a capstone project where students have the opportunity to work in teams of 3-6 to build a product, explore a research topic, or some fusion of these two. The project spans one calendar year and culminates in two main final demonstrations. One demonstration occurs at the end of the fall semester where teams present the progress that they’ve made in the past semester as well as their plans for the coming semester. The other demonstration occurs at the end of the spring semester and lets students present a short demonstration of their work from the past calendar year. Senior Design is offered by each department such that teams can be formed only of students majoring in that department. There is also an interdepartmental offering, which removes restrictions on team composition.

My team, Boomboat, is an interdepartmental senior design team comprised of students with backgrounds in Mechanical Engineering, Computer Engineering, Software Engineering, and Robotics. We are housed in the Electical and Systems Engineering (ESE) department, where Dr. Sid Deliwala and Dr. Jan Van Der Spiegel serve as instructors and field experts. We are advised by Dr. Pratik Chaudhari, and work very closely with Dr. Ani Hsieh. We envision Boomboat as an autonomous solution to small-scale oil spill containment, and with the help of our expert advisors, we believe that we can accomplish this goal.

Our team already has a Github organization that is highly explanatory of our progress to date as well as our roadmap for the future, but right now this is a private repository. We are likely going to release this repository as public by the end of January. However, Senior Design as a course requires that teams are frequently updating their fellow students on the progress they’ve made. As such, we have spent a great deal of time making our work well-formatted and easy to understand for fellow students and faculty. One of the assignments we really enjoyed creating was our kickstarter video, which gave the ~30 second synopsis of Boomboat’s market and a brief outline of our proposed solution. Here’s our kickstarter video: