A MESSAGE FROM THE CHAIR AND DIRECTOR
Michael Collins Professor and Chair
Welcome to our fourteenth annual Mechatronics Engineering Capstone Design Symposium.
This exciting event provides our final-year student teams an opportunity to showcase their design projects to the general public, to industry partners and sponsors, and to the university community.
The students have worked hard from conceptualization to finished product and are being judged on a variety of skills. Their end-to-end process included identifying needs, creating solutions and designs to address a variety of challenging problems in diverse areas including: advanced manufacturing and rapid prototyping, assistive robotics, virtual reality, transportation, and green energy. They demonstrated their competence in applying the knowledge and skills acquired over the course of their undergraduate academic and co-operative work terms.
This is also a major component in our continuous improvement plan for the Mechatronics Engineering program, a plan for providing the best possible education experience for our students. The enthusiasm with which these teams present their work should be evident, and attests to the effort and teamwork that they have put into their projects over the past eight months.
We invite you to engage with the students about their designs, admire the presentations and prototypes, and check out their videos and websites. When you are inspired and excited by the students’ work, feel free to suggest other design project challenges and opportunities to them and their course instructors (contact information at the end of this brochure). To find out more follow us on our website.
We are proud of our Mechatronics students for their achievements this past term. In addition to meeting the challenges of the capstone design project, they had to overcome the additional challenge of completing their design projects in a remote work environment. We all recognize and appreciate the effort it took to get here. We are also eternally grateful to our esteemed Mechatronics Engineering professors, technical staff and administration, the companies and people who help educate our students in the co-operative program, and to the kindness of our sponsors of this event. Your support is important and valued. Thank you!
Sincerely,
Michael Collins Professor and Chair mike.collins@uwaterloo.ca
Andrew Kennings Program Director
Founded in 2003, our Mechatronics Engineering program is the most established of its kind in Canada, unmatched in providing integrated, innovation-driven, multidisciplinary education at the intersection of mechanical, electrical and software engineering, all core strengths of the University of Waterloo. The annual Mechatronics Engineering Capstone Design Symposium has been the launch pad for many innovative engineering design ideas and projects over the years; many of which have successfully translated into new products and processes around which successful enterprises were created and currently operate successfully in Canada and around the Globe. This year’s symposium will offer a collection of very high quality exhibits that will showcase the innovative design projects of our Mechatronics engineering class of 2021. We invite you to view the projects, engage with our students about their designs, watch their presentation videos and see their prototypes in action. For those of you who are inspired and excited by the students’ work, please feel free to suggest other design project challenges and opportunities for them.
Sincerely,
Andrew Kennings Program Director