Team Onset’s volleyball-setting robot wins a national design award

Grace Liang, Kevin Gong, Vincent Nguyen and Austin Lew have just graduated from mechanical and mechatronics engineering at Waterloo. For their capstone they built a robot for coaching professional volleyball players and teams. It delivers repeatable, game-like sets, so an athlete can practise without needing a teammate to set the ball.

Competing as Team Onset, they entered the Canadian Society for Mechanical Engineering (CSME) National Design Competition and were honoured for the technical strength of their design. Each year students across Canada submit capstone and non-capstone projects for national recognition and cash prizes.

At the department’s yearly awards ceremony the project also won Most Innovative Project, an award sponsored by Dyson. The team presented the design at the department’s symposium in March, so this summer’s announcement follows earlier showings.