ECE students shine at Engineering Expo

UIC held its annual Engineering Expo on April 24, an event that is the culmination of a two-semester Senior Design course. The classwork affords students nearing the end of their undergraduate education a chance to solve a real-world design problem, and the Expo is an opportunity to show off their projects.

The Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering kicked off the day with a breakfast for industry mentors who had helped students throughout their projects. Some of the mentors also served as judges for the Expo. This year, ECE fielded 34 teams, including 10 sponsored projects.

The ECE.20 team enhanced a commercially available drone for use in emergency situations, including disasters, wildfires, or rescue operations. Their focus was on improving a Modal AI Starling Drone to include autonomous takeoff, improved GPS waypoint finding, and landing with minimal pilot input.

The team faced challenges in its retrofit; they received minimal documentation from the manufacturer on how the drone’s subsystems came together. The drone’s GPS mount interfered with its microcontroller, and they had to redesign the drone’s hardware. Nevertheless, the team met their goals for the project and hopes to take the drone for a test flight before the end of the semester.

The team included ECE students Luke Abraham, Sabrina Arshad, Shashank Chenna, Akshay Monga, Mrunal Pilivkar, and Minnah Saif.

“The senior design class provided me with an opportunity to apply the concepts I previously learned in class to a real-life engineering problem,” Saif said. “More importantly, I developed new teamwork and leadership skills that I will carry with me to graduate school and the workplace after. The Expo was a great way to end the year; I enjoyed seeing what the other teams came up with and making new industry connections.”

After graduation next month, Abraham will continue working for iManage, where he has interned for the past year, as a software engineer with the company’s legal team. Arshad works at Shure Incorporated in system verification and will attend graduate school at Northwestern University this fall. After interning with the company, Pilivkar will join Motorola Solutions full time as an RF engineer. And Saif will attend Cornell University’s law school and hopes to work in technology or patent/intellectual property law.

Both Chenna and Monga expect to graduate in fall 2026. Chenna works for startup Akknoledge as a full stack engineer, and will join PayPal as a software engineer intern this summer. Monga will join McDonald’s as a software engineer intern this summer.

“I really appreciated the platform for creating something unboundedly and the opportunity to connect with and have meaningful conversations with industry professionals, connections that can help me as I go to graduate school,” Arshad said.

Their project was sponsored by Pranav Bhounsule, an associate professor of mechanical and industrial engineering. Students worked with Luca Russo, a PhD student in Bhounsule’s Robotics and Motion Laboratory. Russo began his UIC career in 2023 through the college’s Italian Master’s Program.

“The team put a lot of thought into their project,” Russo said. “It was a very complex system.”

Expo visitors who stopped by the ECE.34 booth were encouraged to raise a toast with teammates Isaiah Brew, Micheal Ferguson, Bobby Labonite, George Ong, and Dhruv Upadhyaya. The team debuted their home beverage system, which whipped up a menu of custom mocktails from six different ingredients.

The device uses peristaltic pumps to dispense liquids from any standard bottle and is controlled through a companion app that allows users to choose from a library of recipes or create their own custom mixes. It is controlled by an ESP32 microcontroller, which regulates the pumps and weighs the drink. The system operates over Bluetooth.

Obtaining the proper flow rate and integrating the microcontroller into the system were challenging, but the team succeeded in creating a unit that dispensed a drink within 90 seconds and within a 5% tolerance–better than many human bartenders.

The machine cost less than to $250 to build, far less than a similar Black and Decker model on the market. And yes, their machine also works with alcohol.

The project was sponsored by Bhavan Ghandi, the assistant director of data and web development for student affairs technology at UIC, and ECE Clinical Professor Renata Revelo.