Course: MECH401/402: Senior Design
Faculty: Craig Beal
Student: Owen Parent
DP&S Liason: Wes Bernstein
Date: Spring 2019
For their capstone design project, Senior Mechanical Engineering students designed, built, and raced an off-road vehicle for an international competition in Tennessee. Students captured their process and trials using mobile action cameras such as the GoPro Hero 7.
Although the project developed over the course of the school year, the competition took place in April, and a team of senior mechanical engineering students- along with a few junior electrical engineering majors, set out to build a single-seat, all-terrain, sporting vehicle. The vehicle was developed as a reliable, maintainable, ergonomic, and economic production prototype to serve the recreational vehicle user market.
The purpose of the competition was to provide students with a challenging project that involves the design, planning and manufacturing tasks found when introducing a new product to the consumer industrial market. Teams competed against one another to have their designs accepted for manufacture by a fictitious firm.
Students had to function as a team to not only design, build, test, promote, and race a vehicle within the limits of the rules, but also generate financial support for their project and manage their educational priorities.
Important to their objectives were documenting the process, but also utilizing a mobile video technology that could handle both the dangerous and difficult conditions, and also be compact, lightweight, and versatile enough to accommodate different types of videography. Senior Owen Parent partnered with Wes Bernstein of DP&S to review the functionality and versatility of the GoPro Hero7, which allowed for photos, time-lapse videography, & rugged action videography for their team-designed vehicle. See the gallery.
