Bringing Leonardo da Vinci's designs to life

Fani, Michael and Martin choose a project. ©Alain Herzog/EPFL STUDENT PROJECTS - Fourteen mechanical engineering students spent a semester getting inside the head of Leonardo da Vinci. Using his drawings from the 15th and 16th centuries, the teams built ingenious machines - altering the design in some cases - in order to better understand how they worked. 23-gear friction machine team. ©Alain Herzog/EPFL The "Da Vinci Project," a concurrent engineering project devised by Prof. Pedro Reis, created a buzz of excitement among the three participating teams of final-year Bachelor's students. Reis, who heads EPFL's Flexible Structures Laboratory (fleXLab), had the idea for the project during a trip to Florence. He decided to take his own fascination with the work of artist-engineers like da Vinci and turn it into a challenge for his mechanical engineering students.