ME VU–UT bachelor assignments, 2025
Twelve Mechanical Engineering students from the joint programme of Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam and the University of Twente. Tony Currà assigned the projects and supervised them for Olivabot. The bench was Demonstrator Lab Amsterdam.
Bachelor research papers and prototypes, 2025. The credit is the students’.
What this was
The VU–UT Mechanical Engineering bachelor ends with an assignment in a company or lab. Olivabot took a cohort in 2025: six topics aimed at small machines for energy, soft robotics, and agricultural inspection. Tony Currà set the briefs, supervised the research, and sat with the hardware at DLAB. University staff remained the academic side of the programme.
Each student wrote a paper. Some topics were pairs on the same brief with different cuts. They designed, printed, simulated, and tested in one bachelor cycle.
Wind turbine for urban balcony energy
Luc Lamme
Luc designed an energy system around a wind turbine plus a gravitational battery, meant for urban sites. The question was not only the rotor: how you store what a small turbine actually harvests when the wind is ugly and the footprint is a balcony.
Damy van der Vegt
Damy took the rotor itself: a Savonius-type vertical-axis turbine that a consumer FDM printer can make. He combined experiments with CFD, varying aspect ratio, blade count, and twist. In that study, two blades, a 45° twist, and an aspect ratio of 2.1 gave the highest performance coefficient with the other geometry held fixed. The point of the paper is knowledge for people who own a desktop printer, not a factory.
SMA nitinol robots
Milo Koene
Milo asked whether Nitinol — a nickel-titanium shape-memory alloy — can actuate a robot aimed at arboreal locomotion: inspection and harvest in a tree, without a heavy motor pack. He measured thermal behaviour and force on a test rig, in several wire configurations. The honest result in the paper: those wires were not suitable for load-bearing in this setup. They can still inform later, lighter designs. That is a useful no.
Compressors for bioinspired robots
Casper Commandeur
Casper designed and iterated a compact FDM piston compressor in PLA, driven by small DC motors, for pneumatic soft-robot limbs. Printed seals leak. The measured compression ratio in the paper sits close to 1:1 because of that. PLA alone is a poor airtight system. Combining materials is how you get something that actually pumps. He instrumented it with a pressure sensor and wrote down the limits instead of hiding them.
Andrew ten Have
Andrew took the other architecture: a centrifugal compressor at small scale, 3D-printed, aimed at the same soft-robot job. At large scale these machines are easy; at the flow rates of a small pneumatic limb they are not. He used CFD and additive manufacturing constraints (print angle, nozzle) and set a target pressure ratio around 1:1.5 atm. The paper is how you even attempt that geometry when the whole machine has to come off a desktop printer.
Stirling engine for mobile robotics
Sander Marringa
Sander designed a compact, 3D-printed, solar-powered Stirling engine for mobile robots: development and optimisation, not a catalogue engine. Miniaturisation fights leakage, friction, and the fact that printed clearances are not ground steel. The work is whether that cycle still does anything useful once it is small and plastic.
Romy Schardam
Romy treated the Stirling as a small combined heat-and-power idea: low emissions, flexible heat source, theoretically decent conversion — then asked what survives miniaturisation in FDM. The paper is about making the engine smaller, not about replacing a wind farm. Portable heat-to-work, printed, with all the mess that implies.
Linkage walking robots for field inspection
Jesse Nicolaï
Jesse designed, printed, and compared seven lightweight locomotion mechanisms for small agricultural inspection: legged and wheeled, all on a shared motor casing so the legs could swap. No sensors, no closed-loop control — fully passive mechanics. Stability, grip, assembly time, terrain impact. In that comparison the simpler systems — the Strider and the Dual Wheel — did best. Low complexity beat clever linkages for this job.
Dion Hoogewoonink
Dion built a walking robot on a Jansen linkage, printed in PHA — a bioplastic — with rotating joints in the print so the assembly does not need nuts and bolts. Modular, light, aimed at uneven agricultural ground without compacting it the way a wheeled rover does. The research question was how to get that mechanism out of a 3D printer and still walking.
Aerostat for aerial inspection
Ruan Buwalda
Ruan designed an aerostat-based inspection drone for agriculture: how you get lift, what the balloon is made of, and how you propel a craft that is light and low-power. The paper works from buoyancy through envelope choice to a propeller that fits that regime, and closes on a prototype design from that research — not a certified aircraft.
Victoria Eugenia Garcia Calderon
Victoria took propulsion and buoyancy from a candle in a PLA structure: nozzles, Coandă and Venturi ideas, CFD plus a bench test. Simulated outlet flow was much faster than what the experiment measured; PLA deformed quickly in the flame, so the thing does not run for long. Thermal losses and the heat limit of PLA are the constraints. The paper is honest about that gap, and points at composites and better thermal models rather than claiming a flying farm balloon.
Work with us
Firmware, printed mechanics, CAD: firmware and CAD. Email services@olivabot.com.