Mountaintop Summer Experience Wraps Up 10th Year

This summer, projects at Mountaintop’s Building C tackled a wide range of issues, including research integrity in Kazakhstan, autism in Sierra Leone and hunger and food supply challenges in parts of the Philippines. Some projects focused on issues closer to home—one team worked on utilizing Amazon’s Alexa system to answer frequently asked questions on Lehigh’s campus and another focused on decontaminating Lehigh’s recycling stream. One project is using the arts to understand the connection between thought, empathy and scientific reasoning.

"The Mountaintop Summer Experience is always a remarkable time at Lehigh,” Khanjan Mehta, vice provost for Creative Inquiry and director of the Mountaintop Initiative, said. “This year, 36 project teams worked side-by-side, their goals ranging from health care diagnostics in low-resource countries to cutting-edge financial engineering, and created a community of purpose-driven researchers, innovators, and creative problem-solvers. I am always amazed and encouraged by what the students, faculty, and external partners who comprise the Mountaintop teams are able to create by working together, playing by strengths, and focusing on the purpose and potential of these ambitious projects."

At the end of July, the Office of Creative Inquiry hosted its Mountaintop Summer Experience press conferences, allotting students approximately seven minutes to publicly present their projects, with an additional 15 minutes to answer questions and receive feedback from attendees. Presentations were divided into six themed groups: education, behavior, community, financial, technology and health.

The Flying Swarms team, in the first year of its project, aims to compete in a flying robot competition at the University of Indiana that will pose four primary challenges: autonomous flight, interacting with its environment, object detection and determining its location. Teams will compete by passing balloons through different shaped obstacles around the venue. With the helium-filled envelope attached, each vehicle is required to be “lighter than air,” meaning it weighs less than 100 grams.

To tackle the autonomous flight, the team, comprised of Alex Witt ’23, DJ Ammirato ’23, Karen Li ’24 and Michael Fitzgerald ’23, began with an open source multi-rotor aerial vehicle and moved to a tilted-rotor style that offered additional benefits when adding a blimp. David Saldaña, assistant professor of computer science and engineering, is their faculty mentor.

They worked on developing a drone to participate in the 25th RoboSub Competition, which wrapped up in early August.

The competition, an international student competition featuring autonomous underwater vehicles designed and built to mimic real-world systems, was hosted by the University of Maryland. The Lehigh team, earning a Blue Robotics Special Award, was one of 39, which competed both in-person and virtually, representing 14 different countries, including Bangladesh, Brazil, Norway, Russia and Turkey.

The students working on the Underwater Drones project have split themselves into three main teams: the mechanical team, which is designing and 3D printing their own parts at Wilbur Powerhouse; the electrical team, which is designing the electronics structures that connect each component, including the thrusters, on-board computer and flight controller; and the software team, which codes the drone to be able to see and identify objects underwater in the pool. Most of the software team’s research is in image recognition. After seeing objects, the drone has to map and move based off the images it sees.

In the current stage, the drone recognizes a specific set of images and tasks, but a future goal is to have the drone complete more unexpected tasks.

“We have a lot of plans for next steps,” Swider said. “This year was really about learning and getting a jumping off point to develop further.”