Dr. Navneet Garg, from the Airport Technology Research & Development (ATR) branch, mentored a team of five University of Pennsylvania undergraduate students from the Mechanical Engineering and Applied Mechanics Department for their senior year project (September 2023–April 2024). The project, titled Crackle - Autonomous Crack Sealing Robot for Runway Maintenance, involved designing a robot that could repair runway cracks. Dr. Garg assisted the team with details related to pavement types, pavement distresses, mechanisms of cracking in asphalt pavement, increase in crack severity with time, the importance of sealing cracks early, foreign object debris (FOD) issues with cracked pavements, and annual funding spent on sealing cracks by major airports.

The team members, Aditi Chintapalli, Runing Guan, Mei Han, Ilia Kheirkhah, and Shalika Neelaveni, were awarded the Francis G. Tatnall Prize for an outstanding project showing ingenuity, proficiency, and usefulness. As an integral part of the mechanical engineering curriculum at Penn, the two-semester senior design sequence challenges students to apply theoretical knowledge, practical skills, general expertise, and creative ingenuity to tackle significant engineering problems.

Penn students unloading the robot

Students with the robot.

The Crackle Team

Dr. Navneet Garg | Navneet.Garg@faa.gov