2023-2024 Semester 1
1. No water - no cofffee
Challenge owner: Brewanda
Description: You can find the long description here.
Summary: Coffee production in Rwanda is by far the largest agricultural export of the country. Coffee is produced by some 500.000 farmers. A major issue for them is water management, as all these farmers make use of relatively large water streams. This challenge focuses on finding solutions for sustainable water management to improve the local livelihood of Rwanda’s farmers and other citizens.
Can be chosen by students from: AT, AUBS, EE, SI, IE
2. Advancing the sun simulator setup
Challenge owner: Intelligent Lighting Institute
Description: You can find the long description here.
Summary: Light is a crucial element in the daily lives of all people, whether it be for biological reasons, working conditions, safety, or aesthetic pleasure. However, we spend 90% of our time indoors. Therefore it is important to design indoor spaces that allow sunlight to enter. On the TU/e campus, a solar simulator setup is used for allowing people to experience visually and physically the presence of sunlight in indoor spaces. The simulator is however massively outdated, and new ways of demonstrating physically the presence of light in buildings are needed. The system can make use of both new and existing components.
Can be chosen by students from: AT, AUBS, DS, EE, ID, IE, AP, AM, ME
3. Spot K9 Switch Yard Inspection
Challenge owner: Core Changemakers
Description: You can find the long description here.
Summary: CORE is, in cooperation with ProRail working towards the automation of rail yard inspection of train cars and containers using a Boston Dynamics Spot-robot. This robot can collect data on dangerous substances leaking from containers, the presence of (un)authorized personnel and discrepancies between maps and reality. The robot will behave partly autonomously and will partly be controlled by a human, and the challenge is to find the best way to do this.
Can be chosen by students from: AT, AUBS, CS&E, DS, EE, PT, ME
4. Automatic cassava peeler Indonesia
Challenge owner: Fairtrade Original for tapioca mill in Patia, Java, Indonesia
Description: You can find the long description here.
Summary: Fairtrade original is working with cassava farmers in Indonesia as this is the raw material for krupuk. Importantly, large cassava roots need to be processed within 24 hours after harvest into tapioca flour, otherwise they cannot be used anymore. This poses problems as the hand peeling process is very labor intensive, there is a labor shortage, which leads to many roots ending up unpeeled. This creates a preventable loss, if only there was a solution that allows for a more efficient use of the cassava roots.
Can be chosen by students from: AT, EE, PT, IE
5. Next gen hairscan
Challenge owner: Haardokters BV
Description: You can find the long description here.
Summary: The way people feel about their appearance has an impact on their general happiness. Having a condition that makes one lose their hair could generate feelings of uncertainty and depression. In order to help these people, a treatment is possible. However, not all treatments work on all people, and that’s why we need to be able to reliably scan the state of (a piece of) their head. Doing this at the same spot periodically is a challenge, as no technological system that allows for that currently exists.
Can be chosen by students from: AT, BME, EE, ID, MST, PT, IE
6. Quetal
Challenge owner: Van Mierlo Ingenieursburea
Description: You can find the long description here.
Summary: Elderly people who are living independently at home tend to struggle with similar elements of their daily lives: eating healthily, maintaining social contacts, and physical movement/exercise. Detecting potential problems at an early stage might help in providing predictive care so they can live independently for as long as possible. To achieve this, a collection of sensors could be placed in the house that track their behavior and alert caregivers of potential problems. At the same time, this system should provide a feeling of comfort to the elderly, rather than a feeling of being watched.
Can be chosen by students from: AUBS, CS&E, DS, EE, PT, IE, ME
7. Classification of robot pickable products in logistics
Challenge owner: Vanderlande Industries B.V.
Description: You can find the long description here.
Summary: Every day, Bol.com alone delivers more than one million packages to people in The Netherlands. These packages all need to be picked from warehouses. Vanderlande’s Smart Item Robot can typically pick around 60-90% of all the different types of packages, and for the other items a human worker is informed at the moment this picking is impossible. In order to make this process more efficient, a classification of pickable items is needed. In this challenge, students will explore ways of automatically classifying an item set (of typically > 50.000 items) of our customers.
Can be chosen by students from: CS&E, DS, EE, ID, PT, IE, ME
8. OCEAN BOUND PLASTICS
Challenge owner: Archwey - Bluewave Foundation
Description: You can find the long description here.
Summary: Eradicate the use of virgin plastics by designing the complete process of a fully sustainable and circular value chain for ocean bound plastic (BLUEWAVE®)! This project entails diligently selecting a suitable and innovative product (one with big impact and which can be made truly circular) and completely investigating its surrounding value chain. This entails aspects such as design, transport, production, legislation, waste management, etc. Do all this while keeping the complete life-cycle of the product in mind, from cradle to cradle!
Can be chosen by students from: ID, PT, CE&C, IE, ME
9. Warm Technology for People with Dementia
Challenge owner: Expertise Centre Dementia & Technology
Description: You can find the long description here.
Summary: People with dementia are often given tools that are supposed to enhance their lives, but those are often pretty ‘cold’ and static. The Warm Technology Challenge invites students to contribute innovative and ground-breaking examples of warm technology that can have a meaningful impact on the lives of people with dementia and their loved ones.
Can be chosen by students from: AUBS, CS&E, DS, EE, IS, PT, IE
10. Energy transition
Challenge owner: Neways
Description: You can find the long description here.
Summary: The demand and supply of electricity and heat do not match in time with overload in the network as a result while storage capacity is not used. This leads to consumers buying electricity when it is expensive and supplying it when no one needs it at low or maybe even negative prices. The challenge is to better balance demand and supply and estimate the optimum business case for a solution. In this project, we focus on the energy system in a house or a street, and try to find solutions that enable a more sustainable way of matching supply and demand.
Can be chosen by students from: AT, CS&E, EE, PT, CE&C, SI, IE, AM, ME
2022-2023 Semester 2
1. Beaver digging activity scanner
Challenge owner: Waterschap Aa en Maas
Description: You can find the long description here.
Summary: Water authority Aa en Maas is looking for innovative ways to map digging activities by beavers along our waterways and dikes. Beaver digging can result in serious safety hazards. This affects dike stability but also safety for maintenance personnel and for citizens during recreational activities. We’re looking for a solution that helps us to map beaver holes and burrows relatively quickly and easy, so we can remove them and restore the dikes and bank before serious problems arise.
Can be chosen by students from: AT, CSE, DS*, EE, PT, SI, AM
2. Ocean bound plastics
Challenge owner: Archwey – Bluewave Foundation
Description: You can find the long description here.
Summary: Eradicate the use of virgin plastics by designing the complete process of a fully sustainable and circular value chain for ocean bound plastic (BLUEWAVE®)! This project entails diligently selecting a suitable and innovative product (one with big impact and which can be made truly circular) and completely investigating its surrounding value chain. This entails aspects such as design, transport, production, legislation, waste management, etc. Do all this while keeping the complete life-cycle of the product in mind, from cradle to cradle!
Can be chosen by students from: AT, EE, ID, PT, CEC, SI, IE, ME
3. Warm technology for people with dementia
Challenge owner: Expertise Centre Dementia & Technology
Description: You can find the long description here.
Summary: People with dementia are often given tools that are supposed to enhance their lives, but those are often pretty ‘cold’ and static. The Warm Technology Challenge invites students to contribute innovative and ground-breaking examples of warm technology that can have a meaningful impact on the lives of people with dementia and their loved ones.
Can be chosen by students from: AUBS, DS*, EE, ID, PT, SI, IE
4. Design self-sustaining lights
Challenge owner: Intelligent Lighting Institute (ILI) in collaboration with Signify & Team IGNITE
Description: You can find the long description here.
Summary: Light is a crucial element in the day lives of all people. Whether it be for biological reasons, working conditions, safety, or aesthetic pleasure. Though, light is often needed or desired at places without electricity. For example, in parks, rural areas, but even in areas devastated by natural disasters or in war zones. This provides us with a complex engineering challenge. Can we design energy independent, selfsustaining light? Can we use innovative technologies, such as Luminescent Solar Concentrators, or even inspiration from nature (e.g. bioluminescence), to create light that needs no connection to the electricity grid?
Can be chosen by students from: AUBS, EE, ID, PT, CEC, SI, IE, AP
5. Modular buildings
Challenge owner: Janssen de Jong Groep
Description: You can find the long description here.
Summary: Our goal is to “lego-lize” the construction industry. We are aiming towards demountability and reusability of our components and joint used in our buildings and houses. The challenge is to come up with ways to introduce modularity (and circularity) in the house-building process.
Can be chosen by students from: AUBS, ID, SI, IE
6. Packaging solutions
Challenge owner: Janssen de Jong Groep
Description: You can find the long description here.
Summary: In the house-building industry, we pay for packaging four times: the packaging material (usually plastic) itself, the time it takes to wrap big materials, the time it takes to unwrap, and disposal of the material. Can we find a way to eliminate packaging of construction materials and/or eliminate the use of non-renewable materials? This saves resources and enables us to save valuable time and money in our construction process (we can build quicker and cheaper).
Can be chosen by students from: AT, AUBS, CEC, SI, IE
7. Innovative audiometry
Challenge owner: Maastricht University Medical Center (MUMC+)
Description: You can find the long description here.
Summary: Since different pathology might cause hearing loss, the testing of people’s hearing function – particularly in the case of conductive and sensorineural hearing loss – is difficult due to the physical characteristics of the skull and the head. To help people around the world with limited healthcare access, as well as small hospitals and hearing aid specialists, we aim to develop a mobile and semi-automated audiometry test facility for areas of need to provide basic audiometric care, but also as a screening tool at healthcare locations where staff is insufficiently trained.
Can be chosen by students from: BME, ID, MST, PT
8. MBSE in ship building
Challenge owner: Razorleaf in combination with Damen
Description: You can find the long description here.
Summary: If you are interested in working with one of the largest shipbuilders and the 2nd largest software vendor in Europe this challenge will be something for you. You will study the Model Based System Engineering concepts in complex structures, investigate where and how MBSE can bring the most value for a huge shipbuilder who is now confronted with more and more complex systems to be designed and built. Which value will it bring to Damen? Can these principles also be applied on digital engineering models? How do we enable circularity in ship building? These are questions that the group can be focusing on.
Can be chosen by students from: AT, AUBS, CSE, EE, SI
9. Autonomous scoring system
Challenge owner: Silat Academy & Pro Silat
Description: You can find the long description here.
Summary: Pencak Silat is traditional martial arts from Southeast Asia and has been listed as cultural heritage within UNESCO since 2019. Pencak Silat is a jury sport, the jury observes the score and enters it digitally or manually via a jury form. In the past, we saw that this is a very subjective and interpretable way of observing with results at championships often being questionable. The Silat Academy started the Pro Silat project in cooperation with Persekutuan Silat Melayu Netherlands to make the score measurable autonomically. The challenge is to come up with a way to do this.
Can be chosen by students from: CSE, DS*, EE, ME
10. Autonomous information network
Challenge owner: Sita Robotics x TMC
Description: You can find the long description here.
Summary: We are building robots that can explore dangerous environments before people have to enter. In the near future, this robot will have the need for more autonomous features, enabling the use of more robots simultaneously and therefore creating a higher efficiency. For this concept the controller needs to be redesigned and research needs to be done what is needed for edge-computing on the robots and which computing is needed for this idea. Besides a more high-level design is needed to see what capabilities we would like to give to the client and what we can do autonomously.
Can be chosen by students from: AT, AUBS, CSE, DS*, EE, ID, PT, AP, AM, ME
11. Engagement for social impact
Challenge owner: VindiQu
Description: You can find the long description here.
Summary: Whoever states elderly people can’t explore the world anymore is coconut crazy. With VindiQu we take them digitally all over the world through livestreams with expert guides. We are looking forward to revolutionize the experience of our livestream tours. Without any loss of social impact, because that’s our core mission. Creating new ways to stimulate the attendees and make them socially, physically and/or neurologically more engaged throughout their experience. Starting with an ideation phase towards designing and ultimately building a working prototype.
Can be chosen by students from: AUBS*, EE, PT, SI
12. Ballistic protection
Challenge owner: Royal Netherlands Army, Innovation Branch
Description: You can find the long description here.
Summary: Military encampments are regularly in harm’s way, providing protection from enemy fire and thereby often hit by shrapnel and bullets. Currently, the HESCO system (a big bag filled with rubble) is used to provide protection. However, this system is cumbersome and does not provide high-mobility future small encampments need. We challenge students to come up with a material/system that is easy to use, highly mobile and provides protection from bullets and shrapnel.
Can be chosen by students from: AT, AUBS*, EE, PT, SI
13. Energy transition
Challenge owner: Neways
Description: You can find the long description here.
Summary: The demand and supply of electricity and heat do not match in time with overloadin the network as a result while storage capacity is not used. This leads to consumers buying electricity when it is expensive and supplying it when no one needs it at low or maybe even negative prices. The challenge is to better balance demand and supply and estimate the optimum business case for a solution. In this project, we focus on the energy system in a house or a street, and try to find solutions that enable a more sustainable way of matching supply and demand.
Can be chosen by students from: AT, CSE, EE, PT, CEC, SI, IE, AP, AM, ME
14. Farming of the future
Challenge owner: Neways
Description: You can find the long description here.
Summary: The claim on natural resources, the environmental consequences and cost of producing our food are to be well balanced. Precision Farming is one option for this. Preparing of soil, providing nutrition and water and weeding and harvesting at the right time, we can optimize the farming processes. Precision Farming goes one step further and optimizes these measures based on the actual status of plants. The challenge is: how can advanced technology help to implement Precision Farming.
Can be chosen by students from: AT, AUBS, CSE, EE, PT, SI, IE, AM
15. Urban communities of the future
Challenge owner: Horizon2050
Description: You can find the long description here.
Summary: The way in which we think about living is changing. Younger generations are more aware of their influence on the environment, and want to live, work, and go out in different ways compared to their (grand)parents. This challenge is about changing the way in which we organize our lives and start building the urban (and rural) areas of the future.
Can be chosen by students from: AT, AUBS, CSE, EE, PT, SI
* Remark for Data science students: relevant that the challenge should have data to work with in the project.
* Remark for AUBS students: only if challenge can be made relevant for AUBS students.