Good morning! I am Jesus Guajardo, and I am very excited to start sharing my SEED Project with you all. To begin, I am a rising Sophomore at Duncan Residential College at Rice University. I am studying Mechanical Engineering, and I am very interested in topics of robotics, dynamics, and design testing. I joined SEED because I wanted to work on a real-world project that could benefit people’s lives. I am happy to say that I will be able to accomplish that goal this summer.
During the first week of the program, all the interns have been busy getting to know their project and getting introduced to the OEDK. I am glad that I have access to so many useful resources and tools during this internship. On the first day of the program, we met each client and were introduced to every project. After learning about each project by interacting with each client, I took the time to do more research and then ranked each project. The next day, I was given my project, the Smart Helmet. My colleagues and I then took most of the week to contact our clients and research the project. Our main objective is to safely and efficiently integrate a haptic feedback system into the smart helmet design.
For most of the week, we were attempting to get in contact with our clients and other potential sources of background information for the project. Fortunately, we were able to meet with a Rice alumnus that worked on the Smart Helmet for his senior design course. After meeting with him, we learned a lot more about the current helmet prototype. We also got access to important information about the current prototype design specifications. Now we understand what technology has already been incorporated into the design like thermal cameras, vital monitors, and accelerometers. We are looking forward to learning more about the helmet and integrating haptic feedback into the design.
By the end of the week, we were able to get in contact with the Mechatronics and Haptic Interfaces Laboratory at the Bioscience and Research Collaborative building. We went to the lab and acquired the Syntacts kit which will help us integrate a haptic system into the helmet. We are now in the process of learning more about the Syntacts kit and the software used to program it to understand what we can achieve with it. At the same time, we will be conducting more in-depth research into our project and defining our design criteria this coming week.
