At the 2025 Rose Show, a team of students "walked" their robotics project on a leash down the center of the Rose-Hulman Sports & Recreation Center Fieldhouse. A different group strapped on a pair of virtual reality goggles, their joysticks and their project helping other developers have more fun and fewer challenges while creating virtual reality games. Another team toasted their success with the DrinkBot, sipping customized drinks that their client project created, while two more students presented research about how coffee roasts and bean grind sizes affect caffeine content.
Throughout the fieldhouse, students proudly displayed projects that resulted from months or even years of tireless dedication. In total, Rose-Hulman's collegiate version of the World's Fair brought together more than 130 student projects from nearly every discipline and year, displaying innovation, entrepreneurship, and sustainability.
Read on to learn more about some of the projects that pushed the boundaries of innovation at the 2025 Rose Show.
William A. Kline Innovation Award
The William A. Kline Innovation Award honors the legacy of Rose-Hulman's former dean of innovation and recognizes exceptional student projects for their work and dedication.
William A. Kline Innovation Award Winner
ROCKO
Multidisciplinary Studies Red Ribbon Department Award Winner
Katie Collins, Emily Lopane, Elizabeth Ziemer, Kiana Fan, Zoe Edgington, Benjamin Williams
Developed by a multidisciplinary team of students, ROCKO is designed as a multi-modal, open-source robotics platform to bridge the gap in STEM education materials between introductory robotics educations and graduate-level applications.
Designed with attainability in mind, ROCKO costs only $750 to produce.
ROCKO successfully caters to this niche by providing a reliable mechanical system with high-performance electrical hardware, an extensible and production-like software architecture, and capacity for advanced robotics research, including bipedal locomotion, vision, and autonomous navigation.
William A. Kline Innovation Award Runner-Up
New MATHCOUNTS Buzzer System
Jacob Rast, Calvin Hamilton, Linus Wise
This team developed a game show-style system intended for use at the Terre Haute and Evansville regional MATHCOUNTS competitions each year, replacing the previous system, which was clunky and outdated. This system consists of a center console, controlled by an operator; six red and white button box units for buzzing in; and an external timer unit, which will allow contestants to view the remaining time in a round.
The system features light and sound to indicate when a contestant has buzzed in and when the round has ended. The team also integrated adjustable competition settings, including the ability to change the length of a round. All operations can also be controlled remotely via a Bluetooth interface. Other commercially available options cost about $400; this team's solution costs a mere $85.
Biology & Biomedical Engineering
Forces on Horses: Instrumented Saddle Pad
Christian Booth, Natalie Hannum, Amanda Kuhlman, Eliza Steele
The Lakeland Center, a therapeutic riding center in Coatesville, Indiana, teaches children and adults with disabilities how to ride horses. They requested an instrumented saddle pad that can measure the pressure distribution along their equine therapy animals' backs. They hope to use this device in their therapeutic riding sessions to guide riders' therapy plans and to monitor the physical forces on the animals to help prevent injury and pain. The instrumented saddle pad uses a series of sensor-filled patches to measure forces in several key locations along the animals' spine and store and interpret that data for future use and analysis.
Instrumented Rein Device for Equine Therapy
Katarina Helmeset, Sophie Rund, Sarah Shibuya
This project, which was also designed for The Lakeland Center, is designed to monitor and record rein tension during a horse riding simulation. The rider receives immediate feedback through colorful LED lights, and rein tension data is saved on an SD card. These sessions upload to a digital user interface that displays a graph and statistics of the session. This data will be used for future grant applications for the center, further supporting the development of equine therapy in Indiana.
Chemical Engineering
Analysis of Caffeine Content in Differing Coffee Roasts and Bean Grind Sizes
Matt C. Gerona, Lillian Heinze
Kenya Nyeri Igutha AB coffee beans were roasted to four different temperatures using a Aillio RoastTime Bullet R1 roaster. The team developed a method for determining the caffeine concentration of coffee samples using high performance liquid chromatography with an acetronitrile water mobile phase.
The team, seeking to understand how brewing temperature impacted caffeine content, determined that a cup of light roast coffee contains more caffeine than dark roast. They also found that smaller grounds resulted in higher caffeine content.
Civil Engineering
Terre Town Rehabilitation Team
Civil Engineering Red Ribbon Department Award Winner
Cade Watson, Devin Bredehoft, Jake Gibbs, Eli Silva
The neighborhood of Terre Town has not seen much infrastructure investment over the past couple of decades. The City of Terre Haute would like to reconstruct the roads, which provides the opportunity to implement stormwater management systems and the addition of walkable pathways. Currently, the site has poor roadway conditions and lacks stormwater infrastructure. The client for the Terre Town Rehabilitation Project is Mr. Marcus Maurer, a city engineer for the City of Terre Haute. The Terre Town Rehabilitation Project is intended to improve the safety and ease of travel for pedestrians in the neighborhood. The project will also provide a plan for updated roadways and stormwater management. The design includes the rehabilitation of roadways that include the addition of shoulders for safety, and stormwater management to reduce the risk of flooding in the area. The purpose of this project is to provide the community of Terre Town with safer modes of travel and the addition of stormwater management measures.
Autumn Greenway Project
Whitney Shepherd, Nosa Igiehon, Michael Stenger, Lia Potter
The Autumn Greenway Project was initiated by the citizens of Carmel through requests to create an east-west running multi-use trail that would connect the existing Monon Greenway and Old Meridian Street. The City of Carmel narrowed down the connection locations for the trail and a general project site. The proposed project site runs through both residential and commercial properties and crosses two roadways. The Autumn Greenway Project will provide the City of Carmel with a multi-use trail design that safely meets the request of the community and adds value to the existing multi-use trail infrastructure.
Computer Science & Software Engineering
Bracket Odds
Computer Science & Software Engineering Red Ribbon Department Award Winner
Ariadna Duvall, Abe Gizaw, Kaylee Lane, Canon Maranda
Bracket Odds is an engaging website that utilizes a variety of machine learning models to generate March Madness brackets for the men's and women's Division I NCAA basketball tournaments. It provides tournament tools and resources for fans, academics, and high school educators on both desktop and mobile devices. Users of this website can interact with the tournament by creating accounts, saving brackets, and viewing leaderboard rankings.
RESOLVE Verifying Compiler
Computer Science and Software Engineering Red Ribbon Department Award Winner
Ash Collins, William Foss, JL Koenig, Aditya Senthilvel
This project focuses on a verifying compiler for the RESOLVE programming language. During the compilation process, a verifying compiler attempts to prove that a code implementation meets its formal specification as well as generates an executable. This project seeks to improve existing functionality and enhance verification capabilities. The team added error checking systems to the parsing phase, made a command line interface for a subsystem of the prover to allow user experimentation, and made advancement toward selecting and applying theorems to prove correctness. Future work will involve refining theorem selection and application, as well as potential refactoring of the compiler's codebase.
GLADOS: General Learning and Automatic Discovery for Operationalizing Science
Computer Science and Software Engineering Red Ribbon Department Award Winner
Bennett Toftner, Brady Veal, Riley Windsor, Zach Johnson
GLADOS started when Dr. Jason Yoder, a CSSE Professor at Rose-Hulman, found himself building the same interface for many different computational research projects over his years of research. Wanting to ease and speed up this repeated process, he created GLADOS, which began in 2021 as a senior capstone project, with continuous iterations done by different senior capstone project teams each academic year. As of 2025, the project has reached basic usability, allowing for multiple experiments to be run on the system in parallel and giving users ways to organize their experiments within the system.
Chatbot for Psychological Research
Ian Stedham, Aidan Janc, Damian Dalic, Zeno Day
Psychology researchers currently do not have and need an accessible platform to perform research on human chatbot interactions and their emotional impact. The main purpose of the application will be providing a platform to investigate the utility of different chatbot prompts and roles and their effect on the well-being and possible behavioral changes for users. While there are existing platforms that allow users to communicate with chatbots in a psychotherapy setting, none of the current platforms allow researchers to investigate how effective these methods are. This project will provide researchers a streamlined way of exploring the emotional effects of chatbot interactions on users.
Mobile EMR for Street Medicine
Ethan Huey, Carl Blome, Vishrut Patwari, Jake Grellman
This project aims to develop a robust Mobile Electronic Medical Record (EMR) system for pop-up clinics around Terre Haute, designed to support street medicine teams in providing consistent, high-quality care to underserved populations. Developed in collaboration with clinical technicians and leaders, the app integrates core healthcare documentation needs into a streamlined, cross-platform solution. Built with React and ASP.NET Core, it enhances continuity of care and bridges gaps in access through intuitive, real-time data management and reporting.
RealityLib
Joshua Lowe, Matthew McClenahan, Tony Martin, V Philips
RealityLib is an open-source virtual, mixed, and augmented reality framework developed as an extension of Raylib with the goal of providing VR developers a fun and simple framework for building games that were built in C. The project maintains Raylib's philosophy as a framework rather than a full game engine, focusing on adding OpenXR supporting while intentionally avoiding advanced game engine features like state machines or physics. Development took place through an initial series of game-jams that utilized the Raylib library itself, which then transformed into work on OpenXR demos. The team created a library that allows for the simple creation of 3D objects, input tracking, SFX, and basic collision support in a VR headset environment.
Electrical and Computer Engineering
HN Cell Model Hardware Acceleration
Electrical and Computer Engineering Red Ribbon Department Award Winner
Simar Dhillon, Larissa Krakora, Isaac Towne, Josh Schrock, Ben McDaniel
The HN Cell Model is a complex set of differential equations used to model the electrical behavior of a network of neurons in the brain. This model, due to its non-linearity, is difficult for traditional computer architectures to simulate, making it hard for researchers to test new theories pertaining to how large neural networks behave. By using custom lookup tables (LUTs), Ethernet communication, and the open-source Caravel harness for silicon fabrication, the team designed a customer user space leveraging hardware acceleration and parallelization to assist in more efficiently simulating large neural networks.
UDP Attenuator Controller
Electrical and Computer Engineering Red Ribbon Department Award Winner
JJ Henderson, Owen Leonard, Henry Nunns, Lucas Tyson
This project is a device that accepts UDP packet inputs and produces the appropriate control signals for the attenuators on the output. In addition to handling control information, the device has the appropriate physical connections for eight attenuator channels and up to 16 attenuators in total. The device is also capable of physical user input on the controller itself via an 18-key keypad and LCD screen. The device has an appropriate, intuitive, user interface on this screen. The device has its own power management and distribution systems, accepting either DC benchtop power or standard AC wall power.
Power-Optimized Environmental Awareness Monitor for Tracking Human Presence and Movement
Electrical and Computer Engineering Red Ribbon Department Award Winner
Vineet Ranade, Murari Srinivasan
The Environmental Awareness Monitor (EAM) is an ultra-low-power, edge computation device designed to detect human presence through changes in voice, movement, and pressure. It is built around the MAX32660 microcontroller and features a low-power accelerometer, pressure sensor, and microphone. The system performs step and tilt detection, pressure change sensing, and over 81% accuracy voice activity detection, all while running for over 13 days on a coin cell battery. Designed for use in military training, field missions, and facility monitoring, the EAM enables long-term deployment with little maintenance. This project demonstrates how robust environmental monitoring is possible under strict resource constraints.
Engineering Design
The Empowering Flower
Engineering Design Red Ribbon Department Award Winner
Ben Gleason, Abbey Hileman, Mary Sclafani, Molly Townsend
The Empowering Flower is a visual indicator designed for students to inform them of appropriate times to get sunshine. It utilizes Raspberry Pi Picos to communicate outside temperature and UV data to an indoor computer and mechanical flower. When the temperature and UV index are both within a user-specified comfort range, the flower opens, signaling that conditions outside are favorable and encouraging the owner to head outside to enjoy the outdoors.
SunFlower
Engineering Design Red Ribbon Department Award Winner
Owen Smith, Ryan D'Aquila, Tristan Stephens, Jacob Tuck
The SunFlower is a portable, sun-tracking solar generator designed to efficiently capture solar energy while maintaining an aesthetic, nature-inspired form factor. It provides clean, renewable energy for outdoor enthusiasts, environmentally conscious individuals, and others in need of off-the-grid power.
With its automated tracking system, the SunFlower follows the sun's movement throughout the day, maximizing energy efficiency.
"Underneath a protective cover is a solar panel that connects to a power bank and allows it to charge that power bank for you to plug into your phone or even your laptop when you're on-the-go," said D'Aquila.
Grea Plant Tower
Jeremy Bergman, Schuyler Chew, Vanessa Hood, Kayla Kissoondial
The Grea Plant Tower addresses the growing field of urban agriculture and gardening by providing an easy-to-use hydroponic plant growth system that is compact, quick to assemble, cost-effective, and self-monitoring. It allows users with limited budgets, restrictive spaces, and busy lives to engage with sustainability and create a positive impact on their own health.
MagRep
Aaron Altman, Quinn Johnson, Steven Johnson, Deven Wells
MagRep is a modular device that attaches to cable-weight gym machines to track reps, range of motion, and weight used. Using infrared and time-of-flight sensors, it collects workout data and sends it to a Raspberry Pi, and can be viewed on multiple devices. Users get real-time feedback to help workout tracking and monitor progress. Designed to be affordable, compact, and compatible with any machine, MagRep helps everyday gym-goers and trainers bring data-driven insights to their workouts.
"We talked to gym goers to really see what kinds of problems they have," said Wells. "A lot of active gym goers have a hard time keeping track of their weights accurately."
Rock 'em, Sock 'em Fencing Robots
Scott Papasin, Than Mather, Jayne McCormack, Airin Price
Rock 'em, Sock 'em Fencing Robots is a game inspired by the original Rock 'em, Sock 'em, Robots, with the robots fencing with one another instead of boxing. The robots move on a slider and are able to swing their swords at each other. The game also tracks when a sword swing connects and keeps track of the score.
This engineering design team developed the MediMate, an affordable and accessible tool designed to help distribute medication to people who take medicine on a regular basis. It uses a new mechanical approach that allows for scalability and manufacturability through a variety of end-user and industrial methods.
"Our design revolves around a rotating carriage with embedded magnets," said Chaffin. "As you rotate, it will dispense medication."
The entire system costs about $16, and the students are making the designs open source in order to help a greater number of users.
Mathematics
Accessibility on Modified NK Fitness Landscapes
Mathematics Red Ribbon Department Award Winner
Henry Nunns
The evolutionary fitness of organisms can be related to their genotype by a fitness landscape, often modeled in a simplified form so that properties like the number of local optima can be studied. The most classic model, called NK, imposes many assumptions, such as the independence of all interactions from each other and that all genes are always active. This project has loosened those assumptions and studied how more complex modified NK landscapes affect evolutionary patterns, particularly how correlated interactions and gene regulation increase access to the global optimum genotype.
Nunns also earned a Red Ribbon Department Award for work on the UDP Attenuator Controller Project.
Mechanical Engineering
Automotive Benchmarking Photo Table
Mechanical Engineering Red Ribbon Department Award Winner
Christian Duh, Caleb Lehman, Carter Lindfelt, James Morehouse, Max Wheatley
This project is an automated photo table designed to capture high quality images of thyssenkrupp steering columns and other automotive parts for benchmarking. It features a laptop-controlled user interface that controls the movement of a prismatic arm assembly for precise vertical and horizontal positioning of the camera. To capture all angles, a tilt mechanism is used to aim the camera and a rotating plate turns the part for complete imaging. By automating the imaging process, this system enhances efficiency, repeatability, and accuracy in image collection, reducing manual errors and ensuring consistent documentation for future inspection.
Arctic Amphibious All-Terrain Vehicle - Build Team
Mechanical Engineering Red Ribbon Department Award Winner
Jacob Durenberger, Zachary Yong, Nick Edwards, Sam West
The team designed, modeled, and tested innovative systems for an all-terrain vehicle traversing amphibious and arctic conditions. Using subscale proof-of-concept demonstrations, they aimed to optimize the vehicle's ingress and egress maneuvers on sloped shorelines. The systems will autonomously regulate the vehicle's attitude in water and automatically detect wheel slip to redistribute torque across four independent motors, which maximizes vehicle traction in all-terrain situations. By modifying an off-the-shelf remote-controlled truck chassis and fabricating a representative hull model, the team is validating the innovations proposed for the full-scale model designed by a peer modeling team.
Steel Dynamics Coil Bander
Mechanical Engineering Red Ribbon Department Award Winner
Hannah Ponstine, Susan Smucz, Cameron Buckmaster, Liam Fish
Finished steel coils on Steel Dynamics’ (SDI) Galvanizing Line are banded before transportation. This process is currently manual, the operator wraps plastic banding material around the coils, which range up to six feet in diameter. Nearby structures make this an unsafe and tedious process. This team built a banding arch to feed the band around the coil while the operator stays in place. The arch contains the band with a rubber flap until it is pulled free and tightened around the coil. The arch is retractable under the coil and rides on linear rails to move between multiple banding locations.
ExStream Team
Mechanical Engineering Red Ribbon Department Award Winner
Emily Buchta, Cole Chmielewski, Libby Smith, Cate Stauffer
This team worked to develop an interactive water table for Montessori Academy of Terre Haute for students aged 2-12.
Robust and durable, the stream table's recyclable materials and closed loop water system meet the client's sustainability goals.
Combining the team members' expertise in pumps, water, 3D modeling, and education, as well as their connections from previous internships, the team sought to create a safe structure that allowed students to explore fine motor skills, landforms, erosion, and other topics.
The team is also providing a product maintenance guide and educational units that can expand as the children grow to support the longevity of the stream table's use.
Autonomous Lawn Mower
PLo Lodha, Tom Hendrix, Andrew Leonard, Trent Steele, Daniel Gove
This project focuses on the design and development of an autonomous lawnmower intended to serve as a safer, more cost-effective alternative for commercial lawn care operations. By prioritizing manufacturability, reliability, and affordability, the proposed system aims to reduce labor costs while enhancing efficiency.
Campus Waste Measurement
Toby Furgat, Landon Purdue, Jay Adams, Christopher Kellar
Most waste that currently leaves campus is estimated by assuming a fixed waste weight per dumpster pickup, leading to a high degree of error in the campus's waste tonnage data. Under the guidance of Facilities and Public Safety, this project aims to reduce this error. The solution is a steel frame that takes continuous weight measurements of dumpsters via load cells connected to an Arduino microcontroller.
Accessible Bus Map for Terre Haute
Cassie Domke, Peter Morrison, Natalie Olic, Theo Souris
Current maps of the Terre Haute bus system are inadequate, online-only, and can be confusing, especially for users with visual, hearing, or intellectual disabilities. This team is developing a physical, highly accessible map with visual, auditory, and tactile components to be placed at the most frequented bus stops throughout the city, with the goal of helping users navigate Terre Haute more effectively.
LongBall Labs
Alec Lewandowski, Mark Serdinak, Kade Kline, Jimmy Hall, Andres Aguado, Collin VenDerHulst
This capstone team worked with LongBall Labs, a startup founded by 2010 alumnus Keenan Long, to determine how minute differences in baseball bats with identical specifications can drastically impact the outcome of MLB games. The team standardized production and operation of LongBall Labs' measurement systems to help the company scale up quickly.
"We have documented evidence of our technology converting long fly ball outs into homers, helping change the outcome of several games this season," said Long.
Lewandowski, a pitcher and captain for the 2024-25 Fightin' Engineers, said, "Having that connection with a game that I love to watch, love to be a part of, on the biggest stage is very gratifying."
Revive the Run Initiative
Alyssa Solomon, Finn Bromenschenkel, Landen Kerns, Justin O'Donnell
The Terre Haute Children's Museum is home to the Run with the Animals exhibit, which was created nearly 20 years ago. The Run with the Animals exhibit is a fun, interactive exhibit where the museum's guests can select an animal to run "against" and run along a track that lights up at the speed of the animal they chose.
"After 20 years of use and love by the people in Terre Haute, they had us go in and redo the mechanical properties of it," said Solomon.
The small-scale wind turbine was designed for the Collegiate Wind Competition, with the hopes of eventually creating a competitive club on campus to further pursue the project. Building on the work of previous senior capstone teams, the small-scale wind turbine team's goal was to increase the safety of the turbine and how it is measured. Previous iterations of small-scale wind turbines at Rose-Hulman had such powerful performance that the old components could no longer withstand the conditions created during testing.
This team improved the blade design and manufacturing methods to account for the additional load. A remote measurement apparatus was also integrated into the base of the turbine to remove the need for human interaction with the system to quantify the performance. The team also redesigned and fabricated a safety cage for the turbine, as well as safety protocols for operation.
The project enabled the students to explore renewable energy sources and blade-element momentum theory, as well as giving them the opportunity to experiment with different manufacturing methods.
"I learned how to work with carbon fiber," said Smith. "I've never carbon laminated before, but I got to do that multiple times."
Smart CHAIRiot
William Geoghegan and Shaun Yamamoto
The Smart CHAIRiot is a drivable chair created as a mechatronics project. The user provides driver input through a joystick. An LCD supplies readout information about the operational state of the chair. An RFID detector allows the user to lock and unlock the chair using registered ID cards, with audible lock state feedback given through an onboard speaker.
The Smart CHAIRiot is powered by 20-volt drill batteries. The drivetrain comprises one DC motor driving a differential gearbox coupled to an axle that extends to two wheels. Two bike brake calipers stationed about rotor disks provide turning control.
"Our whole idea was to make a wheelchair with extra features on it," said Geoghegan.
Psyche Robotic Explorer
Grant Paradowski, Isaac Jochum, Gabriel Trotter, Charlie Wake
Psyche 16 is a metal-rich asteroid which has been hypothesized to be core material of a planetesimal, currently orbiting the Sun between Mars and Jupiter. Arizona State University partners with NASA to oversee research pertaining to the Psyche project. This project's goal is to design a low-cost mobility system that is capable of operating in the extreme conditions present on Psyche. The final design introduces three additional features to the existing Rocker-Bogie suspension system, adding versatility while maintaining the core functionality of the explorer.
Team P.E.D.A.L.
Dylan Baumgartner, Brock Beehler, Naomi Knudtson, Owen Mullins, Ethan Swanner
In the United States, the number of homeless individuals is growing every day. In Vigo County alone, there are over 2,000 homeless individuals. There are resources to help those experiencing homelessness, including shelters, kitchens, and volunteer services, but none are long-term solutions. There is a need for a solution that includes better stability, security, and longevity to aid homeless individuals and help them get back on their feet. This project aims to provide transitional housing through a bicycle trailer chassis system that features universality, stability, and manufacturability, without compromising an affordable and lightweight frame.
Multidisciplinary Program
Chef's Accessible Cooking Equipment (CAKE)
Aiden Cermak, Max Hansen, Sergio Coco, Amelia Hoffman, Thomas Thullius
Chef’s Accessible Kitchen Equipment (CAKE) is a student-led, student-initiated capstone project that has designed and developed an open-source kitchen scale with audio cues that integrates with an external recipe app to improve measuring experiences of visually impaired individuals in the kitchen. CAKE conducted market research, cooking observations, and meetings with subject matter experts to determine user needs, both latent and primary. The final design integrates purchasable off-the-shelf bowls to increase accessibility for future open source use.
DrinkBot by 5 O'Clock Somewhere
Mindy Altschul, Chase Bilodeau, Lauren Jaracz, Anthony Napreev, Mark Worden
DrinkBot is a drink making robot that the client, DMC, brings to trade shows as a demo machine showcasing their Siemens PLC control capabilities.
DrinkBot has an Italian soda mode as well as a cocktail mode, perfect for all types of events and venues. This team primarily focused on revamping the mechanical design to improve efficiency, portability, user experience, compatibility with their existing PLC code, and ease of assembly.
The culminations of countless hours of planning and design, this year's Rose Show projects aimed to solve real-world problems. From advancing the scope of knowledge, to creating societal impact, to relieving needs of industry clients, the projects push the boundaries of possibility.