Awards

Students: Jack Cotter, Limerick IT and Nick Cotter, UCC

The Cotter Crate, developed by Jack Cotter (21)and younger brother Nick (18) was deemed the best innovation by the Engineers Ireland judging panel. 

The Cotter Crate is lamb handling system that facilitates the quick, safe, easy and accurate administration of vaccines, doses and drenches to lambs from 3 weeks of age. The innovative crate assists by safely and comfortably restraining lambs, allowing a farmer to administer multiple treatments quickly and accurately. The Cotter brothers have estimated that when using the Cotter Crate a farmer can dose 400 lambs an hour on one dose and dose 200 lambs with 4 treatments, lowering labour time and costs when compared with current methods.

CIT’s Kevin Hayes, Muireann Hickey, Cian O'Leary and Jonathan Mullane won the 2018 Siemens ‘Innovative Student Engineer of the Year Award’ for their mobility device, StrydeTech, a life-changing mobility enablement device which provides independence and confidence to those who are unable to stand up on their own.

Student: Aron Purser, IT Carlow

About the project:

Aron Purser’s project, the forklift ‘Bucket Bagger’, was designed to meet the requirements of the agricultural and construction sector. The ‘Bucket Bagger’ is an attachment placed on the front of a forklift, which is used to fill bulk bags. Previously, no bucket existed for forklifts, other than those for teleporters, which were unsuitable for use and also limited driver visibility during operation.

Students: Colm Morley, Shane Timoney, Caolan Treanor and Conor Walsh, IT Sligo

About the project:

The IT Sligo students won the Innovative Student Engineer of the Year Award for their design, titled ‘Automatically fed post driver’. The project allowed tractor operators to drive posts without having to dismount their tractors, significantly improving the safety and efficiency of the process. Previously there had been no post drivers that are able to hold, feed and drive a post without the operator having to dismount the tractor.

Student: Rob Laffan, Limerick Institute of Technology

An automation and control engineering student, Rob Laffan won the Innovative Student Engineer of the Year award for his project Tippy Talk, which uses automation technology for communicating across a multitude of non-verbal disabilities such as autism. He developed his project as a result of first-hand experience with his autistic daughter Sadie.