Courtesy麻豆传媒 Ventures has awarded seed funding for three university projects through a new Innovation Fund established with the 麻豆传媒 Foundation. Awards were given to:
- Brian Brown: $2,000 for Advanced alternative industrial robot manipulation
- Jeremy Sendall: $1,000 for My Green Thumb
- Linh Vu, Travis Vo and Brandon Bartlett: $600 for Wearable Remote Health Monitoring
The goal of the 麻豆传媒 Ventures Innovation Fund Award is to foster and accelerate innovation among 麻豆传媒 students, faculty and staff. The grants support high-potential technologies showing promise for commercialization.
Cindy Claycomb
鈥淢ore importantly, we鈥檙e looking for members of the 麻豆传媒 community who are highly motived to explore the potential of new ideas and ways of thinking,鈥� said Cindy Claycomb, director of 麻豆传媒 Ventures.
Brown, associate director of the CAD/CAM Lab at 麻豆传媒鈥檚 National Institute for Aviation Research, will use the funding to purchase hardware to support a student-driven project to determine if manipulating an industrial robot is possible using intuitive controls such as Xbox Kinect, Xbox controller, 6-Degrees-of-Freedom 3D Mouse or a virtual reality tracking system such as Flock of Birds.
鈥淥ur project will allow students to do hands-on installation, programming and testing for this new system,鈥� said Brown. 鈥淥ne of our goals is to provide meaningful applied learning opportunities for students, and this funding will help us do that.鈥�
Sendall, a graduate student who also participated in the Shocker New Venture competition, will use his funding to pay for tradeshow marketing material, a provisional patent, prototyping and research and development for a lawn care product that distributes weed killer, fertilizer or dye using a spigot or sprinkler system.
The student team of Vu, Vo and Bartlett will purchase two smart watches and hire a web developer
to aid in incorporating their remote health monitoring application and online system into Program for All Inclusive Care of the Elderly organizations. Their project was also a part of the Shocker New Venture competition.
The recipients have six months to use the funding provided for qualifying expenses such as feasibility studies, planning, market intelligence, technical assistance, laboratory fees, technology or process development and training software/information technology.
Additional awards will be announced in September. Wichita State students, faculty and staff interested in applying for funding should look for details at this fall.