Clark Hegewald

Responsible for management and technical decision making for the mechanical division of ARUW - seven semi-autonomous robots, five land, two air, and 38 design and manufacturing engineers at UW.

Aid in training new members while using Solidworks to design parts. Responsible for part review, and collaborating in overall mechanism and concept design. Communicate bot needs with hardware and software teams. Robots utilized custom vision systems to track opponent robots and accurately hit them up to 52 feet away by using inertial sensors, odometry, ArUco tag position confirmation, and an inverse kinematic solver for turret position and orientation, among other systems.

Designing and manufacturing a semi-autonomous turret bot with a carbon sandwich plate chassis.

Summer co-op role responsible for creating customer facing models of pumps, tables, and accessories. Regularly update manufacturing drawings, guide procurement on line-down/no longer stocked inventory purchases, and reducing unique part count and complexity using SolidWorks PLM, a home-grown inventory system, and of course Microsoft Suite. Stay tuned for more!

working with the Vashisth Research Group: Lead investigator in NASA-sponsored reusable thermoforming research project aimed at characterizing a thermoplastic’s response and resilience to continued heating, cooling, and bending at extreme lunar temps. Data collection and analysis of heat response in carbon composites due to novel RF induced dipole heating. Learning professional experiment design and material analysis tools such as use of an Instron and XRD.

Assisted development, inspection, and operation of a novel Friction Stir Welding machine to weld on an internal pipe diameter for nuclear applications utilizing water cooling with continuous weld pressure and heat control. Rapidly design professional parts and drawings for manufacture using GD&T while minimizing machining operations to reduce costs and timetables for the Applied Materials & Manufacturing Group. Developed and presented a weld monitoring rig that enabled guidance of the machine and brought in several hundreds of thousands in sponsor funding from the Department of Energy and the private sector. Extended summer internship to work during school year and until graduation in 2026 due to excellent dedication, attention to detail, and overall efficiency.

Engineered and then precision manufactured a scale rocket-powered hydrofoil boat using various milling and lathe setups. Tested product before presenting concept to Boeing plant operations lead, and former executive management.

Trained alongside industry professionals in manual and some CNC machining operation, developing a keen sense for designing parts for manufacture.

Responsible for leading technical decision and design reviews, critical to club recruitment, new member training, and team funding. Under my leadership, we attended the Worlds competition for only the second and third time in club history back-to-back in May 2022 and May 2023, where we won an award at both for the first time. I also trained the team on using Fusion360, rather than hand sketches, which is what was previously used. I also aided in funding over $8,000 from local companies per year, a club record. Additionally, we published the technical documentation we wrote as a reference guide to the engineering design process.

Responsible for 4 Design Awards and one Excellence Award in the Washington and Oregon competition regions. Led team discussions before and after each meeting to recap progress, discussions, and obstacles.

Managed club financing and sponsorship, while simultaneously working on the design and manufacturing team.

Designed and manufactured mechanical lift and drive systems using VEX robotics pieces and assembly-level sketches.