Engineering students solve soldiers problem at lightning speed [Video]

BYLINE: Karen Dooley

Newswise — It started as a class project for University of Florida senior engineering students, and it became a viable solution for soldiers who needed an easier, faster, and safer way to camouflage their vehicles on the battlefield.

Students from Matthew J. Traum’s mechanical engineering capstone course received real-world training last year when they partnered with peers at Georgia Institute of Technology and the Civil-Military Innovation Institute, or CMI2, to design and produce a vehicle camouflage deployer for the U.S. Army 3rd Infantry Division at Fort Stewart, Georgia.

“This was a successful collaboration that tackled a problem faced by soldiers in the field — and much more rapidly than the Army’s conventional process,” said Traum, Ph.D., an instructional associate professor in the UF Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering.

Traum said a prototype of the UF-designed vehicle camouflage deployment device was delivered to Fort Stewart at the end of the …