The Malott Innovation Awards are the culmination of ME463, Purdue's capstone class for seniors in Mechanical Engineering.  Teams of students work closely with faculty members and industry partners to create prototype products, continually refining and improving them using the knowledge from their engineering courses over the last four years. At the end of the semester, the students present their final prototypes to a panel of Purdue ME alumni who work in various industries; this panel selects the award winning teams.

The top teams from the Fall 2025 Malott Innovation Awards are:

1st place: Rover Works, Carlos Serrano, Carles Pascuet, Borja Echevarria, Samuel Zapata, Daniel Purcell. The Rover Works team developed a Modular Automated Guided Vehicle (MAGV) to offer affordable, adaptable automation for small warehouses and retail facilities. Current competitors AGVs are costly, ranging from $12,000 to $65,000, and lack flexibility. The MAGV, priced at two thousand dollars, features a robust steel-and-aluminum body with two interchangeable modules: a height-docking unit and a conveyor unit that can be swapped in under sixty seconds by one operator. Designed to transport thirty-pound payloads at three to four miles per hour for two-hour cycles, it uses line-following navigation, sonar-based obstacle detection, and an emergency stop for safety. Engineering validation confirms structural integrity with high safety factors and reliable power performance. By removing redundant motors and electronics from attachments, the MAGV reduces cost while maintaining industrial functionality, making warehouse automation accessible, efficient, and scalable for small-scale operations.

Learn more about Rover Works on their GitHub.

2nd place (tie): EchoTendon, Shaocheng Wu, Tom Avery, Sam Greenaway, Enzo Nate, Aditi Edlabadkar. The objective of this project is to develop an accessible tool that detects early tendon overuse and supports injury prevention/recovery for athletes and general users. We designed a wearable ultrasound system that monitors tendon mechanics and reduces the risk of Achilles injuries. The system integrates an industry-grade 5 MHz dual-element ultrasound transducer into a custom 3D-printed ankle brace to enable noninvasive tendon monitoring before and after activity. A final design was selected from two preliminary concepts, and two prototypes of this design were built for testing. For validation, we conducted benchtop transducer testing and performed pre- and post-exercise assessments on teammates to evaluate tendon responses. Overall, this project combines biomechanics, ultrasound signal processing, and wearable device design, laying out the groundwork for a future AI-enabled tendon-health monitoring platform.

2nd place (tie): ELSTAR, Rishabh Ashar, Camille DeMange, Abhinay Dixit, Charlie Sledz, Bradon Timms. Applied Optics Lab seeks to redesign, analyze, fabricate, and test a portable elastic light scattering system (ELS). ELS is used for nondestructive rapid identification of bacteria via matching bacterial scatter patterns to a library. Customer concerns include minimizing cost, size, and weight. The designed portable ELS system has a footprint that is 1/10th of the benchtop system’s volume and utilizes a standard wall power supply, scanning a petri dish using a 2-D movement system. The bacterial colonies are scanned and imaged by reflecting a laser off a mirror through the petri dish into an in-line camera below the dish. The initial locating scan takes a couple of minutes to provide the coordinates of the target bacterial colonies.

About the Malott Innovation Awards

The Malott Innovation Awards are supported by an endowment created in 2007 by Thomas J. Malott (BSME '62, HDR '02), to foster an innovation culture among Purdue Mechanical Engineering students.  Malott is the former president, CEO and director of Siemens Energy and Automation.  His career included executive positions with Parker-Hannifin and the Ransburg Corp., as well as serving on several corporate boards.  He was an inaugural member of the Purdue Foundation Development Council and was awarded the Outstanding Mechanical Engineer and Distinguished Engineering Alumnus awards in 1991 from the university.

Source: Beth Hess, [email protected]

Writer: Jared Pike, [email protected]