Sensors that can warn of structural damage after natural catastrophes. Automated page-turners that enable handicapped people to read on their own. Motion-tracking cameras that perform automatic surveillance.

These are only a few of the exciting ideas coming out of the laboratories and classrooms of the College of Engineering and making their way into the real world via patents and licensing agreements.

The process of turning University research into new products and businesses is managed by the URI Research Office’s Division of Industrial Research and Technology Transfer. The Division assists the URI Intellectual Property committee in reviewing professors’ inventions or discoveries for their potential commercial application, and determining whether to seek patents on them. Once the patents are obtained, the URI Foundation negotiates licensing agreements with companies that want to use them to develop commercial products. The net profits generated from licensing goes partly to the inventors, and partly to supporting research at their departments and the University.

The College of Engineering is one of the most fertile breeding grounds for new patents and intellectual property. The College currently has 42 patents issued and pending, generating licensing fees for the University. 

“The College of Engineering is definitely one of the highest producers of intellectual property on campus,” noted John Topping, assistant director of the Division of Industrial Research and Technology Transfer. “Their rate of discover disclosures and patents is nearly 20 percent greater than any of the other colleges.”

According to URI Vice Provost of Research, Graduate Studies and Outreach Dr. Janett Trubatch, “In addition to its educational mission, the university is both mandated and devoted to making the results of research by its faculty available for products and services that can benefit society. The College of Engineering is an important partner in this enterprise.”

Fostering Further Innovation

One initiative designed to spur even more innovation at the College is a new applied engineering course that will begin in the fall.  The capstone design course is intended to bring together engineering students to tackle real-world engineering issues. To that end, the College has been actively seeking out companies that have design, development and manufacturing problems that they don’t have the time or resources to solve. The goal is to have senior-level engineering students devise solutions as their final projects.

“It will give the students valuable experience working in multidisciplinary teams to solve real problems that companies are facing,” explained Dean Bahram Nassersharif.

The College hopes the program will elicit 8 to 10 problems from companies this year, and eventually grow to 50 per year.

A similar course is already in place at the College — a multidisciplinary design course focusing on assistive technologies for the physically disabled. The project-based course teams students from the College of Engineering and the College of Business Administration to design, develop, patent, manufacture and market innovative devices that will help improve the quality of life for the elderly or those with disabilities. 

“One of the goals of the course is to demonstrate to both engineering and business students the importance and advantages of structuring the product design process so that business functions — marketing realities, financial characteristics, production requirements, etc. — are addressed throughout development,rather than at the end,” said Business Professor Robert Comerford, one of the teachers of the course. “This way, all these issues can be incorporated during product development, saving time and resources and shortening the time-to-market of new products.”

Engineering Professors Musa Jouaneh and Ying Sun also teach the two-semester class. It has already yielded one product concept that has received provisional patent protection — the automated page-turner, a single-switch-activated, portable device that can turn the pages of any size hardcover book in both directions. The page-turner project also won a $10,000 E-Team grant from the National Collegiate Inventors and Innovators Alliance (NCIIA).

The assistive devices class will soon become a permanent senior/graduate course called Rehabilitative Engineering and Assistive Technology, and will be a requirement for the new biomedical engineering curriculum, currently under development.

Collaborating with Industry

The capstone design and assistive devices courses are part of a bigger movement towards strengthening industrial collaboration at the College of Engineering. Recently, the College formed a partnership with the Rhode Island Manufacturing Summit, a non-partisan coalition of manufacturing and business interests founded in 2002 to create and execute policies that drive manufacturing investment and employment in Rhode Island.

According to R.I. Manufacturing Summit Executive Director Bob Flynn, the organization is currently working with the COE to develop an NSF grant program that would help support the placement of URI engineering students in the workplaces of Summit members such as Taco, Inc., Electric Boat, Cowan Plastics, Cranston Print Works, and others.

The College already has strong relationships with a number of local companies, such as Taco, one of the leading manufacturers in the HVAC industry. 

 “Taco and the URI College of Engineering have a deep and growing history,” said Bob Flynn, who is senior vice president at Taco as well as executive director of the Summit. “Taco has funded research and analytical projects at the College, as well as provided internship and employment opportunities for engineering students.”