News

A group of BARC students visited Boeing factories and had the opportunity to showcase their research projects to Boeing Executives and senior technical engineering experts (called Technical Fellows) at the Boeing Airplane Integration Center in Everett, Washington on October 3, 2023. The students presented their innovative solutions to various engineering challenges and discussed how their work could benefit Boeing. The event also allowed the students to interact with Boeing engineers and learn from their expertise and feedback. The event was attended by around 50 UW students and faculty, and many Boeing employees.

The event started with opening remarks by Steve Chisholm, the VP for Functional Chief Engineer for Mechanical and Structural at Boeing, who welcomed the students and shared with them the history of BARC. Michelle Caray, Boeing Executive Site Director at UW, and Tia Benson-Tolle, Director of Materials and Fabrication at Boeing Commercial Airplanes Production, also gave welcoming remarks and expressed their support for the collaboration between UW and Boeing. Seventeen student teams then took turns to present their research projects, covering topics such as safety, inspection, automation, materials, structures, simulation, and data analytics. The presentations were followed by Q&As where the students answered questions from Boeing engineers and executives and received constructive feedback and suggestions. The event concluded networking discussions where the students and Boeing employees exchanged contacts and discussed potential opportunities for future cooperation.

June 2, 2022

On June 2, 2022, graduate students in the Boeing Advanced Research Center (BARC) presented their research to Boeing Executives. In addition to highlighting their innovations they also discussed the impact on Boeing. Students also discussed the benefit of working with Boeing engineers on impactful problem on their graduate research and career.

Steve Chisholm, the VP for Functional Chief Engineer for Mechanical and Structural at Boeing gave the opening remarks and ten student teams presented their work, and got feedback from Boeing engineers. Around 50 UW students and faculty, and Boeing Employees attended the event.

In May 2022, a group of senior undergraduate students at the UW presented their final year Boeing-sponsored capstone projects at the Boeing Capstone Showcase, which was attended by Boeing executives and capstone mentors as well as UW faculty, students and project advisers. In these capstone projects, students gain valuable experience from working within real-world constraints, while sponsoring organizations reap the innovations and insights provided by the project deliverables. Read, for example, about a civil engineering project on a novel design for a wingtip end cap that was produced using 3D printing.

August 20, 2020

BARC research has won the Best of BTEC award for three consecutive years at the Boeing Technical Excellence Conference where hundreds of the Boeing company’s engineers gather each year to discuss innovations.

The 2019 Best of BTEC award went to the work on “Improved Tow-End Recognition for Fiber Placement Inspection using Machine Learning ” by Wei Guo, Ekta Samani, Ashis Banerjee, Sophie O’Neill, Lukas Wavrin, Stacy Harting, John Stewart and Agnes Blom-Schieber.
For additional information see Data Science for Manufacturing.

The 2020 Best of BTEC award in Manufacturing, Materials & Safety went to the work on “Mechanically actuated pneumatic avatar for out-of-tank teleoperated control” by Shuonan Dong, Jerry Chungbin, John Fuller, and Sam Pedigo with Ben Wong, Kyle Schultz, Lucky Singh, Derek Loy, Wade Marquette, Santosh Devasia, and Joe Garbini.

The 2021 Best of BTEC award in Manufacturing, Materials & Safety went to the work on “Cross Ply Machine” by Shuonan Dong, Nate Secinaro, Alan Locke, Sam Pedigo and Silas Studley, with Nini Hong, Devin Ide, Lucky Singh, Lukas Wavrin, Kevin Hsu, James Hutchinson, Connor Burch, and Santosh Devasia.

June 17, 2019

The Boeing Advanced Research Center (BARC) has received $1.2 million from the Washington State Department of Commerce’s Energy Research, Development & Demonstration Program’s Clean Energy Fund. BARC is one of ten selected this year out of 52 total applicants.

BARC is a collaborative lab in the College of Engineering with Boeing-employed affiliate instructors working mainly with faculty and students in the departments of mechanical engineering, aeronautics and astronautics, and industrial and systems engineering.

The award ­– along with additional funding from Boeing and the UW – will help lay the groundwork for a new UW Advanced Composites Center, which will bring together composites manufacturing research projects and educational efforts.

This new center will allow BARC researchers to advance their work to make composites manufacturing economically viable by ensuring better quality, lower energy costs, and waste and scrap minimization. Specifically, the team’s project will demonstrate how to predictably design and produce complex thermoplastic composite parts using automated robotic systems.

Read Article

April 29, 2019

The Boeing Advanced Research Center (BARC@UW) lab recently participated in its 5th year of Engineering Discovery Days, which hosted over ten thousand middle and high school students for two days. This year’s exhibit was led by Taylor Woo and Michelle Ko, who are the first Industrial Design and Art students to join the lab. Their vision was to inspire their young visitors through virtual reality (VR), and to showcase just how enormous and sophisticated Boeing robots are in real life. Modeled after a 15% scaled down Collaborative Robot Cell displayed at waist height in the lab, their virtual exhibit allowed visitors to walk through and explore this cell at life-size.

When dawning the VR headset, visitors find themselves at the heart of an 80,000-sqft factory that is home to four large robots moving about to precisely complete their tasks. While the robots tower nearly 16’ in height, visitors can easily take control and command the robots to follow their hands – providing a literal hands-on lesson in joint kinematics. Off in the distance of this digital facility also are automated guided vehicles roaming about, and a shell rendering of a parked 787 Dreamliner to scale, which visitors can walk around and under. For most, the exhibit appears to be a game, however its scope far exceeds that, as it represents the potential future of robot programming; where demanding coding on a monitor may someday be superseded by an intuitive virtual 3D interface. The hope would be one day, one or more of the ecstatic lab visitors, will return to lead such an effort.

This year’s Discovery Days, examples the BARC lab’s commitment to further explore new ways of leverage all the student talent made available through academic partnership – going beyond the College of Engineering. Expect to see more development in the near future as the BARC lab spins up to make use of its newly acquired visual concepting and design talent.

Special thanks to Luke Wavrin, Elma Dedic, and Liza Manevich for their active participation and support of this exhibit.
Thanks also to Jonathan Ahn and Sam Pedigo for their leadership to make this happen.

May 15, 2018

Deans from Eastern Washington U, Western Washington U, Walla Walla U, St. Martin’s U, Seattle Pacific U., Seattle U., Washington State U., Gonzaga U. and UW Bothell and UW Tacoma were hosted by UW Seattle COE Dean Mike Bragg. The Deans visited BARC as part of their visit to UW.

BARC students presented a couple of on-going projects in BARC. The Dean’s also got an overview of BARC efforts and how education and research come together in BARC.

Some of the Dean’s were pleasantly surprised to find their former students now working in the BARC lab for their M.S. Degrees.