WSU Ventures has awarded seed funding for three university projects through a new Innovation Fund established with the WSU Foundation. Awards were given to:

• Brian Brown: $2,000 for Advanced alternative industrial robot manipulation
• Jeremy Sendall: $1,000 for My Green Thumb
• Linh Vu, Travis Vo and Brandon Bartlett: $600 for Wearable Remote Health Monitoring

The goal of the WSU Ventures Innovation Fund Award is to foster and accelerate innovation among Wichita State University students, faculty and staff. The grants support high-potential technologies showing promise for commercialization.

“More importantly, we’re looking for members of the WSU community who are highly motived to explore the potential of new ideas and ways of thinking,” said Cindy Claycomb, director of WSU Ventures.

Brown, associate director of the CAD/CAM Lab at WSU’s National Institute for Aviation Research, will use the funding to purchase hardware to support a student-driven project to determine if manipulating an industrial robot is possible using intuitive controls such as Xbox Kinect, Xbox controller, 6-Degrees-of-Freedom 3D Mouse or a virtual reality tracking system such as Flock of Birds.

“Our project will allow students to do hands-on installation, programming and testing for this new system,” said Brown. “One of our goals is to provide meaningful applied learning opportunities for students, and this funding will help us do that.”

Sendall, a graduate student who also participated in the Shocker New Venture competition, will use his funding to pay for tradeshow marketing material, a provisional patent, prototyping and research and development for a lawn care product that distributes weed killer, fertilizer or dye using a spigot or sprinkler system.

The student team of Vu, Vo and Bartlett will purchase two smart watches and hire a web developer

to aid in incorporating their remote health monitoring application and online system into Program for All Inclusive Care of the Elderly organizations. Their project was also a part of the Shocker New Venture competition.

The recipients have six months to use the funding provided for qualifying expenses such as feasibility studies, planning, market intelligence, technical assistance, laboratory fees, technology or process development and training software/information technology.

Additional awards will be announced in September. Wichita State students, faculty and staff interested in applying for funding should look for details at www.wsuventures.org this fall.