Engineering Students Win Triple Prize at the Japanese qualifying round of the iCAN’24

A team of students from the Faculty of Engineering won the second prize, the Idea Prize, and the Poster Prize in the Japanese qualifying round of the 15^th International Contest of Innovation (iCAN’24).

The contest is an international competition where participants propose applications using MEMS devices and compete with the prototype of the applications. The Japanese qualifying round for the 15^th contest was held at Sendai Mediatheque on 14^th April 2024, with 13 teams from all over Japan. The top teams will compete in the World Championships scheduled to take place in Davos (Switzerland) in July.

The team “Jammy Tech” (Araki Amane, Ikehera Hinata, Kasajima Yakushin, Huke Koyuu, Tanaka Junsei) proposed a disaster robot support “CoCa.” CoCa goes to the affected area to listen to the survivors’ talks, converts them into text data, summarizes them into requests, classifies them, and stores them in the cloud. Rescuers can view the data using a simple web app and quickly formulate a rescuer plan. CoCa also aims to be close to the hears of survivors, with the ability to change facial animations based on the joy or sadness of the content of the talks.

(Hiroshi Kawakami, Faculty of Engineering)