Industry-Sponsored Student Capstone Projects

An athlete living with MS needed safer, more supportive ways to move, stretch, and exercise in and around a bed during periods of limited mobility, when getting in and out of bed and spending extended time in bed became especially challenging. The project explored a bed-adjacent mobility system intended to help a partially impaired user engage muscles and stretching while accommodating changing day-to-day needs, improving ease and security during bed transfers, and providing an aesthetic that felt calming and motivating. The work was aimed at producing a first-run prototype design and engineering concept suitable for future refinement toward a market-ready system.

Adaptable House Project needed a seating element that supported its integrated mobility system while remaining easy to use, compact when not in use, and visually appropriate for the home environment. This work focused on the design, build, and testing of a stowable "hanging chair" intended to provide a comfortable, playful, and aesthetically pleasing seating option that enabled the project’s full-support use mode. The effort produced design and engineering information to support creation of a full-scale working prototype, advancing a seating capability that could combine mobility support with simple operation and space-efficient storage.

Adaptable House Project needed a cost-effective, reliable winching capability for an overhead mobility system intended to support people with changing mobility needs while encouraging physical movement and independence. To address this need, the project focused on the design of a scaled prototype winching system that could attach to an existing tabletop XY gantry and demonstrate key operating concepts for a future full-scale system. The resulting prototype was intended to show how a winch-based approach could support multiple modes of operation within the overhead mobility platform, and included controls developed to demonstrate basic system behavior.

GPS signals are vulnerable to jamming, spoofing, and terrain obstruction, threatening autonomous vehicle operations. ANPC's Transponder Landing System (TLS) offers a GPS-independent positioning solution, currently used for manned military and research aircraft in complex terrain. This project demonstrated TLS as a viable drone navigation system by developing a GPS-TLS toggle algorithm capable of autonomously controlling a drone in GPS-denied environments. The system can maintain a maximum 10 ft deviation from a prescribed flight path at 100–400 ft AGL, reducing dependence on on-site pilots and enabling mission continuity where traditional navigation fails.

As part of the University of Washington’s broader campus decarbonization effort, this project addressed a previously identified need in the Energy Renewal Plan to separate process steam loads from the central campus steam distribution system. The project focused on assessing steam process demand and site conditions for a specific group of buildings, with particular attention to MHSC, and developing a preliminary recommendation for how those loads could be served independently. The proposed approach considered the sizing of supplemental steam heating systems in relation to available space and electrical capacity, along with project cost estimates. It also evaluated emerging options for full or partial electrification of steam demand, including resistive heat, air-source heat pumps, and thermal energy storage, to identify a practical pathway for reducing reliance on the existing steam network and supporting future energy system decarbonization.

This project develops an AI video analytics pipeline to quantify safety risks at the NW 43rd St and 8th Ave NW intersection in Seattle's Ballard neighborhood, where the Burke Gilman Trail crosses local streets. Sponsored by AIWaysion, the system integrates YOLO26 detection, BoT SORT tracking, CVAT based labeling, homography calibration, and short horizon trajectory prediction to compute time to collision and post encroachment time metrics. Outputs include conflict heatmaps and evidence based countermeasure recommendations for City of Seattle stakeholders to support data driven roadway safety decisions.

EdgeDiffuse explores the deployment of Stable Diffusion–based image generation models on resource-constrained edge devices. As generative AI models grow increasingly powerful, their computational demands limit accessibility beyond cloud infrastructure. This project addressed that gap by applying mixed-precision quantization, structured pruning, and knowledge distillation to compress Stable Diffusion for deployment on ARM-based hardware (Orange Pi RK3588), with and without NPU acceleration. The goal was to achieve at least 20–25% model size reduction while maintaining acceptable image quality, enabling real-time, on-device generative AI without cloud dependency.

Approximately 1 million people in the United States experience blindness or low-vision conditions. Despite football being the most popular American sport, accessibility in football is an underexplored field. This team developed the first rechargeable football with variable haptic and auditory feedback. Changing haptic patterns indicate proximity to the endzone, while pulse and continuous modes of auditory feedback relay whether the ball is airborne or carried. This technology enables people with varying levels of blindness to play an adapted version of flag football by signaling the location and state of the ball.

Bechtel needed a reliable perimeter levee concept for a new industrial facility planned on a low-lying marsh site with difficult geotechnical and hydrological conditions and a high risk of flooding. The work focused on developing a 10,000-foot levee design in accordance with U.S. Army Corps of Engineers guidance, along with a construction sequence and supporting documentation for field execution. The proposed capability included levee layout and typical cross sections sized to address elevation, slope, settlement, factor of safety, design life, mitigation measures, cost considerations, and owner requirements. It also defined construction staging, inspection hold points, and weather-related considerations, and incorporated sediment and erosion control features to support Stormwater Pollution Prevention compliance. Together, these materials were intended to provide a buildable levee concept, clarify construction constraints and maintenance considerations, and enable the site to be protected from flooding before further facility construction proceeded.

The project addressed a need to reduce nitrogen in the final discharge stream at the Mukilteo Wastewater Treatment Plant by aiming to develop an automated controls strategy for secondary treatment. Using current and historical biological treatment data, the work was intended to develop a calibrated process model and evaluate control approaches that could fit within the plant’s existing infrastructure. The project aimed to produce a technical memo, preliminary process and instrumentation drawings, and a cost analysis to help assess potential operational improvements and savings.

The project addressed a need to reduce the amount of chemicals used to remove phosphorus at the Arlington Wastewater Treatment Plant. Although the plant already removed most phosphorus through its normal treatment process, it still relied on alum to keep phosphorus levels within permit limits when wastewater conditions changed. The work was intended to explore an automated control approach that could better adjust chemical dosing at key points in the plant using existing equipment and operating data. Planned outputs included a technical memo, preliminary process drawings, and a cost analysis to help assess potential operational improvements and savings.

This project examined and compared different circuit board materials to determine which ones worked best for small wireless antennas. The antennas were designed to operate around 2.45 GHz, a common wireless frequency used by devices such as Wi-Fi and Bluetooth. This student team designed the antennas, simulated, tuned, fabricated and measured their performance in terms of return loss, gain patterns, Axial Ratio, and polarization, and compared the results. They evaluated the tradeoff between performance, cost, manufacturability, and the ease of design for each material. The goal was to identify a material that provided the best antenna performance while still being practical and affordable to produce.

Blue Origin utilizes Carbon/Carbon (C/C) composites for flight-critical components because the material tolerates extreme temperatures in inert gas and vacuum, but it remains vulnerable to oxidation during atmospheric ascent, descent, and re-entry. To support lower-cost production of oxidation-resistant coatings, this project focused on improving understanding of the pack cementation process used to form a protective silicon carbide layer on C/C surfaces. This work builds on foundational experimental and analytical research by Prof. Mueller at the University of Washington, who developed earlier versions of these oxidation-resistant coating systems. The coating process embedded parts in a powder mixture of silicon, silicon carbide, alumina, and fumed silica inside a graphite retort, then heated the assembly above 1600°C to drive reactions that converted the surface to silicon carbide. As an initial phase, the project proposed thermogravimetric analysis with mass spectrometry to characterize mass change during heating, identify gaseous species released through the firing cycle, and determine critical temperatures associated with the underlying reactions. The student team worked to provide the thermodynamic and kinetic insight needed to better control and optimize the coating process.

This project focused on the need for a simpler, lower-cost way to automate temporary fastener installation within robotic drilling and fastening systems used for launch vehicle structural assembly. The project aimed to design a compact installation tool for aero-structural components that can accept a temporary aerospace fastener, orient it correctly, insert it into a pre-drilled hole, and apply controlled torque to complete installation. The tool concept integrated mechanical, electrical, and controls hardware, including Siemens PLC-based torque control, and was designed to fit within a defined physical envelope for mounting on a larger automated robotic system. The design supports more cost-effective automated fabrication systems and provides a tool design that could potentially be replicated across automated assembly robots.

Blue Origin's Club for the Future sought to improve its digital postcard program across its website and self-contained kiosk platform used with museums and science centers, where the experience needed to better engage large public audiences while remaining accessible across devices and input types. This project focused on user-centered designs and simple prototypes for an upgraded postcard creation experience, including selectable color and photo backgrounds, branded stickers, enhanced drawing tools, improved menu icons and tooltips, and updated kiosk calls to action. It also explored enhancements to related touchpoints such as the online gallery and one-time “Flown to Space” email, along with an evaluation feature to gather user feedback, recommendations for safe use of AI image generation, and concepts for line-drawing “selfies” tied to a contest partnership. Together, these improvements make the platform more appealing to participants and partner institutions while extending the reach of the postcard experience for students, educators, and space enthusiasts.