ECE 188: 2025 Capstone EDX Event
29 student teams from the COE at UCSB showcased their innovative solutions to real-world problems at the 2025 Engineering Design Expo (EDX)
From The Robert Mehrabian COE article "Students Present Innovative Engineering Solutions at the 2025 Capstone Design Expo"
The EDX event drew a large crowd of faculty, student peers, industry leaders, and the public, while a panel of COE faculty and industry professionals selected the winning projects in the categories of Electrical Engineering (nine projects), Mechanical Engineering (sixteen), and four “multidisciplinary” teams combining students from Electrical and/or Computer Engineering plus Mechanical presented and demoed their projects to attendees.
The Capstone Program enables fourth-year engineering students to select a project from a range of ideas proposed by industry sponsors, and challenges them to spend a year — working from ideation and prototyping to final testing and presentation — to solve a real-life problem. The process highlights the COE’s commitment to leverage cross-disciplinary collaboration and strong industry partnerships in preparing students to have real-world impact.
“This year’s class was one of the best I’ve had the pleasure of working with,” said Ilan Ben-Yaacov, a teaching professor in the Electrical & Computer Engineering Department, and a Capstone Program instructor. “We saw so many unique innovations across a wide range of areas, from autonomous vehicles, infrared imaging, aerospace, and medical diagnostic tools, to consumer tech, and AI-powered image recognition, among many others. The students’ creativity and execution were truly impressive.”
In addition to sharpening students’ technical skills, the Capstone experience cultivates essential soft skills. Adailton Nali Junior, a member of the team that created the EE/ME Hybrid Autonomous Wayfinding Courier (HAWC) — an autonomous delivery system for disaster relief in high-risk, low-infrastructure environments — said that his team’s project was a powerful learning experience in which he gained valuable insights about product development, leadership, negotiation, and the broader business context of engineering work.
“While engineering coursework emphasizes procedural proficiency,” he said, “working in a multidisciplinary team with five electrical- and five mechanical-engineering students showed me that communication, coordination, and team dynamics are just as critical to a project’s success.”
Sponsorship plays a central role in the success of the program, noted Ben-Yaacov, saying, “It takes a village. Our sponsors provide not just the project ideas and funding, but also technical mentorship that offers students real-world simulation.”
Team PulsIR (EE/ME), which won the Excellence in Multidisciplinary Engineering Award, credited their sponsors, Teledyne-FLIR, with guiding them as they developed a handheld diagnostic tool featuring an integrated FLIR Boson+ thermal camera. Designed for clinical use, the device allows doctors to generate thermal maps of a patient’s skin temperature to detect subtle disruptions in blood flow, thus enabling painless, affordable early detection of tumors and diseases such as diabetes.
Cecelia Gant, one of the ten members of PulsIR, noted that the team met with representatives from industry every week to receive mentorship, “Ryan Helling, mechanical engineering manager, provided critical guidance in mechanical design and temperature regulation,” she said, “and Ryan Stevenson, electrical engineering manager, offered expertise in programming, microprocessors, Wi-Fi configuration, and web integration.” The mentors, she added, helped the team shape the project timeline and stay on track while facilitating networking. Beyond technical support, she said, the “two Ryans,” as they came to be known fondly by the team, “also connected the students with appropriate contacts who could offer deeper insight into the workings of Teledyne-Flir’s world-renowned thermal imaging technology.”
The 2025 Capstone Design Expo showcased a spectacular range of student innovation across an impressive array of disciplines. They included Edna Bot (ME), the result of a collaboration with NOAA (National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration) to create an autonomous ocean-sampling rover for gathering marine data without the need to deploy humans, and Seed Cyclone (ME), a sustainable agricultural solution providing precise seed dispersal with the aim of minimizing weed growth. The AXOLYFT (ME) team designed an adaptive accessory to support individuals with physical disabilities, while LiteSpeed (EE) developed and implemented an autonomous driving algorithm on a 1/10 scale open-source self-driving vehicle designed for education and research.
ECE 188 BEST PROJECTS
Multidisciplinary
- Excellence in Multidisciplinary Engineering: PulsIR (Teledyne-FLIR)
- Distinguished Technical Achievement in Multidisciplinary Engineering: CViSion (Chandrasekaran)
Electrical Engineering
- Excellence in Electrical Engineering: POGO (ASML)
- Distinguished Technical Achievement in Electrical Engineering: radIoQ (HRL)
- 2025 F1Tenth RoboRacer Competition Champions: ROS2 Raiders
ECE 188 PROJECT DESCRIPTIONS
Electrical Engineering
- PrecisionFit: Better fit for your feet
- Ray-Quasar: From the Void to the Victory Lap
- LiteSpeed: Swift, Smart, Simple
- AccuScope: Spotting errors before they matter
- SemiSense Solutions: Advancing Sensing for Advanced Processes
- POGO: Fun Intuitive Reliable
- ROS2 Raiders: SLAMing the Competition
- radIoQ: Intelligence hiding in plain sight
- AutoTenth: Racing the Future, One Tenth at a Time
ECE 188 Multidisciplinary
