Senior Design Projects - Fall 2025 Showcase

This project focuses on the development of a wearable gas detector designed to enhance safety in hazardous environments, such as construction sites, underground areas, chemical plants, and disaster response zones. Workers in these environments are frequently exposed to dangerous gases like carbon monoxide (CO), carbon dioxide (CO₂), methane (CH₄), and oxygen (O₂) depletion, which pose significant health and safety risks. The proposed wearable device addresses these challenges by continuously monitoring gas concentrations and providing real-time alerts through visual, auditory, and vibratory signals when unsafe levels are detected.

Key features of the device include its lightweight and compact design, ensuring comfort and portability for users during extended shifts. Additionally, the device is built for durability, capable of withstanding harsh environmental conditions such as extreme temperatures, dust, and moisture. The inclusion of an intuitive user interface ensures ease of operation, even for users with minimal technical training. With a long-lasting battery life of 8 to 16 hours, the device supports uninterrupted operation during typical work shifts, reducing the need for frequent recharging.

Through detailed feasibility studies, market research, and user surveys, we identified a clear demand for an affordable, reliable, and portable gas detection solution. Unlike existing bulky or non-portable systems, our device integrates cutting-edge sensor technology with modularity, allowing for customizable configurations tailored to specific user needs. This project not only aims to fill the gaps in current gas detection solutions but also contributes to improving occupational safety standards across industries. By bridging these gaps, the wearable gas detector will enable workers to proactively respond to hazardous situations, potentially saving lives and preventing long-term health issues.

This project involves designing an RFID tag for inventory management within a warehouse environment. The tags are attached to objects using an adhesive and will respond to interrogation signals sent from a reader. They will respond with a unique identifier indicating the tag’s corresponding object. We reviewed several standards that we are designing our product to comply with. The most important standards to follow are those involving the regulation of usable frequencies by the FCC. During concept development, we generated three possible designs that we could use to create the product. The design chosen for the initial prototype was a custom designed active powered RFID tag. This approach would allow the tags to be rechargeable and reprogrammable for easy repurposing across different items. An accompanying portable reader device was also developed for use with the tags. 

FPL is currently developing a drone to facilitate phasing operations. The current process consumes many resources, including personnel, cost, and traffic disruptions. The Drone Phasing unit seeks to solve this issue by decreasing the personnel needed for specialized vehicles, which will aid in reducing traffic congestion.

This project focuses on the development of a low-cost, entry-level avionics board designed for self-landing rocket systems. The design was created with affordability, modularity, and ease of integration in mind, consolidating data acquisition, telemetry, and autonomous flight control capabilities into a compact and custom PCB solution. The board is designed to collect critical positional information and health metrics including temperature, pressure, and acceleration and transmit this data to a ground station for real-time monitoring, while making onboard autonomous in-flight decisions to properly direct the rocket.

The design procedure of this board included conducting thorough research on the different sensors and components used, PCB arrangement and development, firmware creation, and mechanical evaluations. A lot of focus was directed towards reducing noise and electromagnetic interference between components and attaining vibrational and thermal stability. Across two semesters our team took an idea and turned it into a prototype, refining both hardware and software throughout the process to create a stable and replicable design within a budget limit of $634.

Initial testing of the board was conducted and focused on verifying sensor input management and signal output performance in simulated flight scenarios. Although full system integration and in-flight performance are still unverified, initial development phases suggest the possibility of establishing a scalable and reusable avionics platform. When refined, this system has the potential to back educational programs, research projects, and commercial prototypes focus on affordable, autonomous rocket recovery ultimately helping to achieve the wider objective of making near access to space more sustainable and economical.