My senior design project was the creation of a laundry folding robot we named Foldie. The team was an interdepartmental (mechanical and electrical) team of four. We worked together to determine robotic folding algorithms, and then designed, fabricated, and programmed all electromechanical mechanisms.
Historically, faculty or industry partners mentor senior design teams, however we mentored ourselves as an entrepreneurial effort. The senior design professor appreciated this so much he repeated the project for six future senior design iterations, and wrote a paper about it: IEEE: A Method to Provide Student Peer Mentorship within the Capstone Experience. Afterward, we worked as senior design undergraduate TAs to mentor the following semester’s student group.
Foldie won 2nd best mechanical design and 2nd best electrical design in the fall 2016 senior design exposition, shown below:
Our team also won best senior design presentation, shown below:
I was in charge of mechanizing tape measures as linear actuators, scrapping together custom conveyor belts, and providing a crease holder mechanism. I turned our conveyor belt methodology into an Instructable: Inexpensive Flat Conveyor Belts.
Feel free to view my partner Derek’s project page on Foldie.
Foldie is my favorite project of all time, and it inspired my laundry image classification project five years later: