NYU Tandon’s high-tech showcase returns to Downtown Brooklyn

DOWNTOWN BROOKLYN — Humanoid robots, a mountain bike for disabled riders, a way to get the gunk out of the Gowanus Canal, zero-carbon concrete, cybersecurity projects and do-it-yourself medical devices were just some of the projects on view in Brooklyn Commons (formerly MetroTech) on Friday at New York University’s 2024 Tandon Research Excellence Exhibit.

“We launched this Expo in 2013, and the press about that day promised New Yorkers a ‘chance to walk into the future,’” Dean Jelena Kovačević said in her opening remarks. “I think that still holds true today, and over the last 11 years the Expo has become more incredible than ever.”

Chemical and biomolecular engineering professor Rasti Levicky, part of the event’s organizing committee and one of the advisers on a team that is developing a car to run on sustainable energy, told the Brooklyn Eagle that he was especially excited by the life-science and chemistry projects he saw on Friday. “I’ve seen students develop noninvasive iron sensors for measurements at home, and braces to help combat conditions where the spine deteriorates and the back is bent over.

“There’s also robotics, artificial intelligence, image recognition and traffic engineering,” he said. “I’m looking forward to the time when you have cars and you can just relax, and the car has the sensors and the intelligence to safely get you from point A to point B.”

Some of the exhibits represented Vertically Integrated Projects (VIP), Levicky said. In these expansive projects, students from many different disciplines collaborate, just like in the real world. “That’s the kind of thing you can’t always teach in class. You need to have people cross boundaries.”

A mountain bike to help handicapped hit the hills

Noel Joyce, an assistant professor at NYU Shanghai, and Phil Caridi, Makerspace manager and adjunct faculty member, have been advising Project Mjolnir, one of the VIP projects, for 18 months. 

“We’re designing and building an adaptive mountain bike so wheelchair users can get back out into nature and into the mountains, and we’re doing it as an open source project, so the files will be available for people to download and build their own bikes,” Joyce, who is himself handicapped, told the Eagle.

The professors said a 30° gradient is manageable with the prototypes the student team demonstrated on Friday. “We have assistive drive and low gearing so we can get up pretty decent hills. I’ve ridden the hell out of these things —  crashed them, broken them, tested them, put them back together, everything you can think of,” Joyce said.

Project Mjolnir is also a global project. “We built a couple here, we built two in Shanghai, and we built one in Abu Dhabi where we have main NYU campuses. So students can go from this campus and work on the project in Abu Dhabi or Shanghai and vice versa.”

“The students are instrumental — we are just the advisers,” Caridi noted.

The project is called “Mjolnir” because Mjolnir was Thor’s hammer. “It was a divine instrument for breaking things down and doing all kinds of stuff, right? So we look at this as something that breaks down barriers,” Joyce said.

Soaking up Gowanus gunk

Student Hao-Wei Shih said his group was using hydrogel to remove toxic metals from the very polluted Gowanus Canal.

 “We want to clean up the Gowanus by using our protein-based hydrogel product that is also a thermal-sensitive. If you increase the temperature, you change from a solution into a gel, and then you can decrease the temperature and reverse back. By this way you put your solution into the river and you heat it up to form a gel. During this process the heavy metal will bond with the hydrogel. You clean up the hydrogel and then put it back into the river to reuse,” he said.

Since “you can’t heat up the whole canal,” the group puts the hydrogel into a bioreactor so it doesn’t get out into the water, he added. “The water flows through, chelation will do the sequestering and then you can clean it up.”

2024 Award Winners

Vertically Integrated Projects (VIP) Category

– 1st Place: The NYU Robotic Design Team’s TITAN Rover

– 2nd Place: Reshaping Robotic-assisted Mobility with Soft Robotics

– 3rd Place: A Greener Concrete Jungle: Zero-Cement, Zero-Carbon, Zero-Mesh Concrete

Areas of Excellence Category 

– 1st Place: From Contamination to Remediation: Hydrogel for Heavy Metal Removal

– 2nd Place: InclusiveRealms

– 3rd Place: A Computervision-based Approach to Improve Urban Building Façade Inspections in Cities