Multidisciplinary Senior Design Projects

The AHRT Lab serves as an industry client for RIT’s Multidisciplinary Senior Design (MSD) program, where interdisciplinary teams of engineering students tackle real-world design challenges over two semesters. We are currently sponsoring two active projects that advance our lab’s robot platforms and social robotics research.

Seeking Sponsors

Both projects welcome industry and government sponsors to help fund materials, components, and student development. Sponsorship supports hands-on engineering education while advancing cutting-edge robotics research at RIT.

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🦾 Manipulator Arm for Boston Dynamics Spot

Project Goal: Design and build a custom manipulator arm attachment for the Boston Dynamics Spot robot that enables autonomous object manipulation in field environments.

Why It Matters: Spot is a highly capable mobile platform, but adding manipulation opens new possibilities for human-robot teaming in search and rescue, inspection, and field research. This project bridges our lab’s reinforcement learning and human-robot teaming research with real hardware.

What Students Are Building:

  • Custom end-effector design for diverse grasping tasks
  • Integration with Spot’s existing SDK and control interface
  • Autonomous and teleoperated manipulation modes
  • ROS-based control architecture

Disciplines Involved: Mechanical Engineering, Electrical Engineering, Computer Engineering

Photo placeholder — Spot with manipulator arm prototype

Sponsorship Opportunities: Component funding, sensor donations, mentorship from industry engineers

🤖 RIT Social Robot

Project Goal: Design and fabricate a custom social robot platform for research in human-robot interaction, with a focus on inclusive communication for diverse user populations.

Why It Matters: Commercial social robots are expensive and often not customizable for research. This project gives our lab a purpose-built platform for studying interaction with Deaf/Hard-of-Hearing individuals, older adults, and other underserved communities — directly supporting our Human-Robot Teaming research.

What Students Are Building:

  • Expressive face/head mechanism for non-verbal communication
  • Multimodal sensing suite (camera, microphone array, proximity)
  • Modular design for swapping interaction modalities
  • Software framework for behavior scripting and autonomous interaction

Disciplines Involved: Mechanical Engineering, Electrical Engineering, Computer Engineering, Industrial Design

Photo placeholder — Social robot concept/prototype

Sponsorship Opportunities: Actuator/sensor funding, 3D printing materials, embedded computing hardware

About RIT's MSD Program

RIT's Multidisciplinary Senior Design program brings together students from across engineering disciplines to work on sponsored, real-world projects. Teams are mentored by faculty and industry partners over two semesters, culminating in a working prototype and public demonstration. Learn more about MSD at RIT →