Mechanical engineering senior's team wins top Design Day 2026 award
(From left) Mentor M. Cecilia Lluria-Gossler, Walter Davenport, Roberto Diaz, Ramon Partida, Estevan Aragon, Kayla Mellendorf, and Tallen Monnett celebrate winning the Craig M. Berge Dean’s Award for Most Outstanding Project.
More than 500 University of Arizona engineering students converged on the Student Union Ballroom on May 4 for the College of Engineering’s 2026 Craig M. Berge Design Day. Design Day is an opportunity for students to show off their capstone projects, incorporating a number of engineering and science skills while working as a team.
The Craig M. Berge Dean’s Award for Most Outstanding Project, with a prize of $7,500, went to the team presenting TOMI, a crop-pollinating robot. The steel-framed autonomous robot pollinates tomato plants and detects pests inside greenhouses.
“Our goal was to automate pollination, pest identification and wrap it all up in a friendly, one-stop shop of an app,” said Estevan Aragon, team lead and mechanical engineering student.
Tomato plants require gentle agitation to pollinate and produce fruit. Manual greenhouse processes are tedious and time consuming. Whereas, TOMI travels along a predefined path and with tiny fans on board gently stimulates each plant. Built-in cameras help with navigation.
“All the user has to do is input a height window,” Aragon said. “The robot handles the rest, moving up and down so every flower gets stimulated.”
The team used images to train computer vision, an artificial intelligence model, to identify crop-destroying insects, such as whiteflies, thrips and fungus gnats.
“None of us had ever trained a computer vision model before,” Aragon said. “It took about eight months and thousands of images to get it working, but we got our accuracy up to 76%.”
The Department of Biosystems Engineering sponsored the project to modernize greenhouse operations.
“Right now, workers have to manually inspect plants and count pests grid by grid,” Aragon said. “Our system automates that. It detects a high-risk pest and sends a notification through the app.”