The First Proof
Himaya, INSPIRE ’26, and the system we are building at 42 Abu Dhabi
Machines keep an account of what happens to them. In a rotating engine, an abnormal event does not simply occur and disappear; it leaves traces in vibration, acoustics, and rotational behaviour. Those traces may be faint, noisy, or individually inconclusive, but they remain physical evidence of an event the human eye may never have seen.
Himaya began with the belief that, if those traces could be interpreted together, uncertainty could be narrowed into evidence.
On 5 September 2026, that belief became the prototype that earned our team the Most Innovative Award at INSPIRE ’26: Engineering the Invisible, an Arduino UNO Q Hackathon hosted at the American University of Sharjah by the IEEE Solid-State Circuits Society AUS Student Chapter.
More than 100 teams from schools and universities across the UAE had applied, and ours was among the 22 selected to compete. Every member of our team was a freshman. We arrived at AUS knowing that many of the students around us had considerably more academic and technical experience; we also arrived convinced that a serious idea, treated seriously, had every right to stand beside them.
By the end of the day, the judges had given Himaya the award for innovation. The award matters to us enormously, but it is not the whole story. The more important story is what we chose to build, why we believed it deserved to exist, and what the result revealed about the engineering culture we are trying to establish at the 42 Abu Dhabi Robotics Club.
The question behind Himaya
Aviation safety already benefits from sophisticated systems designed to detect hazards before they reach an aircraft. Radar, cameras, wildlife-monitoring programmes, and airfield sensor networks all answer important upstream questions: Is a hazard present? Where is it moving? How might it be avoided?
Himaya was conceived at a different point in that chain. We were interested in the physical aftermath: once an abnormal event has reached a rotating system, what can the machine’s own response tell us about what occurred?
The distinction is not an argument against prevention. It is an argument for complementary evidence. Detecting a flock near an airfield and interpreting the condition of an engine after an encounter are related tasks, but they are not interchangeable. The first concerns the environment around the aircraft; the second concerns the behaviour of the machine itself.
The scale of the broader problem made that distinction worth investigating. According to the US Federal Aviation Administration, approximately 24,500 wildlife strikes were reported across 870 American airports in 2025, equivalent to roughly 67 reports each day. In the FAA’s long-term bird-strike data, engines accounted for 25% of damaged aircraft components. [The FAA’s published figures can be found here.]
No responsible engineer would claim to solve aviation safety with a one-day prototype. We set ourselves a narrower and more defensible objective: to demonstrate that accessible hardware could capture several forms of physical evidence from a controlled rotating-engine testbed and use their relationship to discriminate between different operating conditions.
Three views of the same event
Himaya takes its name from the Arabic word حماية: protection. We designed it as a low-cost, external, multimodal engine-health concept built around three sensing channels.
The vibration channel observes structural response, including imbalance and sudden mechanical disturbance. The acoustic channel listens for transient events and changes in the machine’s sound. The rotational channel provides operating context, allowing the other measurements to be interpreted against the behaviour of the rotating system rather than considered in isolation.
That final point is central to the design. Real mechanical environments are not polite enough to produce one unmistakable signal whenever something goes wrong. An acoustic spike may be environmental noise. A vibration peak may accompany an ordinary change in operation. A momentary variation in rotational speed may have an entirely benign explanation. Treating any one of these measurements as an unquestionable verdict would produce a system that was simple, confident, and frequently wrong.
Himaya instead looks for coherence between physically independent measurements. When vibration, acoustics, and rotational behaviour change in a related way within the same interval, the combined pattern begins to form a signature. The purpose of multimodal sensing is not to accumulate more data for its own sake; it is to give each measurement the context required to make the others more meaningful.
This principle has established engineering precedent. A NASA technical memorandum examining foreign-object-damage events found that traditional engine-health parameters or structural vibration could each be inconclusive when considered alone, whereas fusing physically different measurements could provide a stronger identifying fingerprint. [The NASA technical memorandum is available here.]
NASA did not validate Himaya, and we would never use its research to imply otherwise. What the research provided was far more useful than borrowed authority: it gave us a serious physical principle which could be examined at prototype scale.
Turning physical traces into a classification
Our architecture followed a straightforward evidence chain: the system would acquire several physical signals, align them in time, extract meaningful changes, compare their behaviour, and then classify the resulting pattern.
The sensors first observe the same rotating system from different physical perspectives. Their readings must then be considered within a common time window, because a disturbance becomes more informative when its acoustic, vibrational, and rotational effects can be related to one another. From those aligned readings, the system can examine features such as changes in vibration magnitude, transient acoustic energy, and departures from expected rotational behaviour.
For the controlled test rig, we framed three operating states: healthy operation, a rotational anomaly, and an ingestion-like transient. The wording of the third state is deliberate. We simulated a category of sudden physical disturbance on a small test rig; we did not reproduce the conditions of a certified turbine-engine ingestion event. Technical ambition does not require theatrical claims. In fact, a system becomes more credible when its builders can state precisely where the evidence ends.
Our prototype was therefore not flight-ready avionics, nor was it a substitute for the instrumentation already present inside an aircraft. It was a working investigation into whether a multimodal diagnostic idea could be made accessible, measurable, and demonstrable with the hardware available to us.
Engineering under constraint
INSPIRE ’26 imposed a particularly valuable condition: teams were not permitted to bring their own electronics. The Arduino boards, sensors, and related components had to come from the organizers, while participants could bring only non-electronic construction materials such as cardboard, foam board, glue, and tape.
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That rule prevented any team from arriving with a disguised finished product, but it also made the day an unusually honest test of judgment. We had to adapt our architecture to the supplied hardware, build the physical rig, establish reliable sensor behaviour, integrate the code, preserve the logic of the original idea, and prepare a coherent demonstration within the same limited window as everyone else.
Engineering under those conditions is not chiefly a test of how much information a person can remember. It is a test of whether a team can distinguish the essential from the decorative. Which measurements are indispensable? Which failure mode deserves attention first? What can be simplified without hollowing out the idea? When an elegant plan meets noisy hardware, which part of the plan should survive?
The build inevitably acquired the disorder common to serious prototypes. Connections had to be corrected, sensor behaviour had to be interpreted, assumptions had to be revised, and the physical structure itself became part of the signal environment. There is a particular kind of humility that only hardware can teach: the circuit is unmoved by how persuasive the slide deck looked.
The team’s task was not to perform certainty but to reduce confusion. Under pressure, leadership meant protecting the central logic of Himaya while allowing everything around it to change. The final demonstration did not emerge because the day unfolded according to plan; it emerged because the team remained capable of reasoning when the plan stopped being useful.
What the freshman result actually means
Every member of our team was at the beginning of university life, while many of the teams around us included senior students with deeper formal training and more time around engineering projects. That context makes us proud, but it should be handled with proportion.
Their experience was not a weakness which we exposed, and our inexperience was not a magical advantage. The presence of accomplished competitors raised the standard of the room. It made the recognition meaningful precisely because we were not being measured in a protected category for beginners.
What the result demonstrated was not that experience is irrelevant; it was that disciplined curiosity can become technically consequential earlier than people expect. Innovation is not awarded according to the number of semesters completed. It emerges from the quality of the problem selected, the coherence of the system proposed, the honesty of the evidence presented, and the team’s ability to make an idea survive contact with reality.
The judges did not recognize Himaya because we had attached several sensors to a rotating object. They recognized that we had chosen a distinct layer of the aviation-safety problem and built a coherent physical argument around it. The Most Innovative Award validated the originality of that decision as much as the object sitting on our table.
The system behind the team
For me, this achievement also belongs to the 42 Abu Dhabi Robotics Club and to the robotics cursus we have been developing there.
The cursus is not intended to be a collection of workshops which leave participants with scattered exposure and little durable ability. It is a structured, project-driven system in which members progress through increasingly demanding ranks, form teams around engineering challenges, work from explicit subject sheets, document their decisions and iterations, submit tangible evidence, evaluate one another, and defend completed work publicly.
Its underlying philosophy is that technical knowledge should survive three encounters: contact with hardware, scrutiny from other people, and the obligation to explain itself clearly. A student does not complete a project merely by producing an attractive object. The work must be reproducible, documented, questioned, and defended.
Himaya was not simply an achievement which the Robotics Club could claim after the fact. INSPIRE became an external test of the habits that the cursus is designed to cultivate: problem selection, systems thinking, collaborative execution, evidence, technical communication, and intellectual honesty under pressure. The judges had no obligation to care about our internal ambitions. They saw only the quality of the idea, the prototype, and the explanation placed in front of them.
That is why the result matters to the club. It suggests that the system we are building can produce work which remains credible outside the environment that created it.
As President, I do not want the Robotics Club’s future to depend on occasional flashes of individual talent or on the energy of one leadership term. A club built around personalities weakens when those personalities leave; a club built around standards, rituals, and repeatable systems can outlive its founders. The greater ambition is not to produce one award-winning team. It is to create an institution capable of producing serious builders repeatedly.
Himaya is an early result of that ambition, not its conclusion.
Creation, failure, and the cost of becoming capable
I have never believed that meaningful creation emerges without consumption. Every serious build spends something: time, comfort, certainty, ego, or an earlier version of the idea which must be discarded so that a better one can take its place. The cost is not evidence that the process has gone wrong; often, it is evidence that the work is changing the people doing it.
My own instinct has always been to attempt more than I can presently guarantee. I have said before that I have tried more than most people have failed, not because every attempt succeeds, but because failure has never been allowed to become a final description of my ability. A failed attempt is information acquired at a price. The only unforgivable expense is paying for that information and refusing to learn from it.
Himaya required us to ask a question larger than our present experience and then grow towards it in public. The award does not prove that we have arrived at mastery. It proves that the direction has merit, that the standard is worth raising, and that ambitious work can be pursued without abandoning precision or humility.
What comes after the award
The Most Innovative Award deserves to be celebrated. It belongs visibly and equally to Mustafa Muhammad, each of whom carried responsibility for turning Himaya from a proposition into a physical demonstration. It also belongs, in part, to the community which made the attempt possible.
We are grateful to the IEEE SSCS AUS Student Chapter and the American University of Sharjah for creating a competition serious enough to test us; to Arduino and Besomi Group for the hardware and technical support; and to the mentors and judges who gave young builders both assistance and scrutiny.
Gratitude, however, should not be confused with satisfaction. The proper response to recognition is not to make the award the centre of one’s identity, but to become worthy of it again under harder conditions. For Himaya, that means better-controlled experiments, clearer performance measures, stronger classification evidence, and a more mature physical system. For the Robotics Club, it means improving the cursus until work of this quality is not a fortunate exception but a recurring consequence of the culture.
Machines remember through the physical traces they carry. Institutions remember through the standards they establish and the people those standards shape. Himaya taught us something about both — and it has given us a great deal more to build.
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Himaya was built by Me & Mustafa Muhammad from 42 Abu Dhabi. The project received the Most Innovative Award at INSPIRE ’26: Engineering the Invisible on 5 September 2026.
