Fast Fufu

For my senior capstone, my team created an automated fufu maker, a product that, despite its high market potential, does not currently exist. Fufu, a notoriously intensive West African dish made of yam and plantain, requires two strong, able-bodied, skilled people to make it. See here for a Fufu-making demonstration:

https://www.youtube.com/shorts/wTD5y-QPDw8

Millions of people consume fufu on a weekly basis; thus, we created FastFufu to make the recipe accessible to a variety of consumers (namely, people with physical limitations, people who live alone, people who lack the space and experience to make traditional fufu, and those who simply want to speed up a usually onerous process).

Concept ideation and selection were long and intensive processes. Ultimately, we decided on 5 subsystems, each of which utilized a distinct mechanism highlighted below. The entire machine was controlled by a state machine program that allowed all parts to work in tandem. Our biggest challenge was when our printed pounder parts failed under load . We tried to remake them using aluminum and projections; however, then the waterjet broke, forcing us to manually machine our pounder essentially from scratch. This limited our spring's compression and ultimately our desired force output. Our team's final report with extensive information about the product is linked here:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1exee_42lVKrh_J0JxfAT2j0WyTas3sTp/view?usp=drive_link

Fast Fufu was my favorite project by far! It was an incredibly user-centered yet mechanically complex series of design challenges. I learned about gear and linkage design, power transmission for pounding, and designing for manufacturability.