Shival Shah

Mechanical Engineering @ Boston University

Shival Shah

Passionate about building elegant solutions to widespread problems, and mechanical engineering provides a broad toolkit to do so. I'm a student based in the SF Bay Area, attending university in Boston, and I'm interested in robotics, space, and design.

In my free time, I play competitive tennis, read, and explore the city with friends.


Projects

Flashlight — Solo Project

A machined aluminum flashlight designed from scratch. Features one handed brightness control via a magnetic slider that communicates through the waterproof body, tactile ball detents, knurled touch points, and a custom PCB designed in Fusion.

Formula Electric / SAE — Team Member

A custom radiator test bench that measures heat rejection capacity, enabling a 30% reduction in radiator size. An integrated electric water pump eliminates coolant flow issues at idle.

Human-to-Everything Lab — Undergraduate Researcher

Co-authoring a paper on a learned routing framework for autonomous navigation that dynamically offloads complex scenes to a cloud model while keeping routine navigation on a fast local model, balancing accuracy against inference cost in real time.

Tennis Ball Pickup/Feeder — Tennis Captain

A dual function ball machine that collects tennis balls from the court and feeds them for practice, combining two separate commercial products into one unit at a quarter of the cost.

Smart Window — Team Lead

An automated window that monitors temperature and air quality on both sides and opens or closes itself to ventilate with outdoor air instead of running AC.

A directional infrared communication system with a rotating transmitter and stationary receiver, designed for environments where RF signals are undesirable. Constrained to 15mW transmit power.

A two-stage soil erosion detection system combining drone-based aerial imaging with ground rover verification. Reached California state finals in Samsung's competition (top 1% of 30,000 teams), winning a $5,000 grant.

Air Hockey Table — Solo Project

Full-size air hockey table with a shop vac plenum chamber and custom playing surface, built in about two months using almost entirely salvaged materials.