Senior Elective Communications Systems Courses as Pathways to Capstone Projects in Electrical Engineering Technology Program

In any engineering program the capstone project is the most comprehensive work completed by the students, and is regarded as the pinnacle of their engineering studies, with all their course work culminating with this major design, implementation and reporting product. Coming up with the actual topic of the project is sometimes the most difficult part of the project, especially in programs where the project topics are not solely proposed by the faculty, and they are for the student and advisor to develop together. This is especially the case of engineering technology programs, where a large percentage of students have work background (either from military training or industry, as interns or full-time employees) to which they can relate their senior projects, and the programs allow and encourage them to apply their coursework studies to application areas where they have strong hands-on skills. While core courses of any curriculum provide the foundation of the engineering education, the elective courses give the students the chance to refine their education path and focus on the area of their interest. Senior elective courses are defining the areas of specialization within a major, and they may also serve as grounds for the students to explore potential options for the capstone project, and to have the opportunity to get a good starting point for it, ahead of the capstone semester. In this paper, the senior level courses specific to communication systems area of concentration within an electrical engineering technology program are discussed, their course content and the term projects included, and how they offer venues to capstone project choices. The paper presents specific examples of how these course projects gave students successful pathways for capstone projects. The course content that can be covered by the curriculum of an undergraduate technology program is somehow limited, especially for a broad field such as communication systems, and beyond the fundamental theories, the courses can go in more details only on very few narrow areas. Therefore, with a term project in an elective course, students have the opportunity of a semester of deeper study of a topic of their choice, and the learnings and new skills developed can be later applied for the completion of a capstone project. The paper also discusses students’ opinions on the option of developing initial results or skills as part of a course project and continuing such project into a senior project, as well as how their topic selection is related to their background, previous experience and future goals

Teaching electronics-ICT : from focus and structure to practical realizations

We present a four-year electronics-ICT educational master program at Ghent University in Belgium. The students develop knowledge and skills from novice to experienced electronic circuit designers. In the corresponding topics, the immersion into engineering problems is deepened. The horizontal and vertical alignment of courses in the four-year master program at our university is discussed. The curriculum of the four-year master program is highly projectoriented and all topics are clustered around a well-considered set of standards. This clustering supports the logical structure of the program, with students gradually acquiring the necessary competences. All standards and their mutual interaction are extensively discussed in the paper. We also focus on four design-implement projects included in the electronics-ICT program, explicitly following CDIO-guidelines. Whereas the first-year project has a limited level of difficulty, the challenges increase significantly in the course of the next years. Students learn that product design is an iterative process on different levels, where the design strategy can be changed continuously based on important and crucial feedback. Different evaluations have demonstrated that our students are not only aware of CDIO-principles, but are also convinced of the quality of the results obtained by following the standards

Incorporating Energy Related Concepts into EE and CS Laboratory Work and Coursework

During the course of this interdisciplinary effort, members of the Electrical Engineering (EE) and Computer Science (CS) departments collaborated on energy related curricular efforts. Initially work was carried out to develop and utilize an inexpensive, open-source system for measuring, storing, and displaying energy related data from across campus. Hardware and software components chosen were open source or free for educational use. A low power Linux server was utilized. The LAN-enabled Arduinos included sensors to measure energy related quantities such as power and temperature. EE and CS students were engaged in various aspects of the project – EE students focused on the hardware, CS students focused on the programming. EE junior students worked with clients to implement real world measurement and display solutions. A CS student project focused on developing a JavaScript-based web page that visualizes sensor data by leveraging CanvasJS and JQuery packages. This web page development project will continue in spring 2016 as the work is significantly incorporated into the CS department’s Software Engineering and Information Technology Systems classes. Most recently, EE junior projects (fall 2015) emphasized collaborations across a wide variety of disciplines: projects include wetland environmental factors (Biology), greenhouse environmental factors (Biology), pump energy usage (ME), weather monitoring (Physics), and classroom temperature monitoring (Facilities)

The AutoDrive Challenge: Autonomous Vehicles Education and Training Issues

Automotive companies are focusing significant research and development efforts on autonomous vehicles. As they do so, they recognize the need for a large, well-trained workforce that is equipped to conduct these research and development projects, particularly in light of the projected shortages of STEM professionals in the United States. Some of these companies have found various ways to engage with professional societies and with universities to encourage the development of this workforce, and to promote themselves to STEM students while they are still in school. One such effort is the SAE / GM AutoDrive ChallengeTM, a new collegiate competition organized by SAE International in collaboration with General Motors Corporation. In this competition, eight teams are working to modify a Chevrolet Bolt to meet the requirements of a Level 4 autonomous vehicle (i.e., a vehicle that is totally capable of driving itself within a certain operational domain). Teams were selected for this competition through a proposal process, with one of the requested components of the proposal focusing on existing courses and the development of new courses at the participating university. In this paper, we will discuss the roles of students and faculty advisors at one of the participating schools, address issues related to education and training of students who want to work in the autonomous vehicle industry, and discuss the benefits of the competition to all of its stakeholders. This discussion will include the skills developed by students, the outcomes of the competition, and the value that is being created for the automotive industry. As part of this discussion, we will focus on the close ties that can be forged between the participating universities and the corporate sponsors of the AutoDrive Challenge, as well as the impact on course development at the universit

Robotics Focused Capstone Senior Design Course

This work describes the educational experiences gained teaching the Senior Design I & II courses, a senior level, two-semester sequence in the Electrical Engineering (EE) program at Georgia Southern University (GSU). In particular, the authors present their experiences in using robotics as the main area to develop the capstone senior design, with focus in interdisciplinary interactions and teamwork for the design and implementation of autonomous mobile robots. Other main purpose of the capstone design course sequence is for the students to experience working in an engineering application project researching and analyzing the sustainability, ethical and social impact issues related to their projects. The students work for two semesters as a team to design, test and build a mobile robot project for a particular application. Some of these projects have been fabricated to participate in different robotic competitions, including the IEEE sponsored hardware competition, the lawn mower competition, and the robot waiter competition.

Database development for community service.

At the University of Louisville, there is no continuous and dependable connection between the needs of the community for expert help in solving practical problems and the capabilities of the students enrolled in cumulating experience courses. Culminating experience courses are designed to provide students with experience in real and pragmatic problem-solving situations. Connecting these courses with community needs not only provides students with such experiences but also betters the community. A database instituted on the University of Louisville website would be a regular and continuous medium for such connections to be made. In this research, a database created by computer engineering and computer science students was populated and a user’s manual was created. This work describes the extensive background of the situation and anticipated research benefits in addition to the database programming and population and the procedure for finding matches. The impacts of the implementation of this database would be invaluable. Once the database is made functional for Speed School courses, faculty members in the other colleges at the University of Louisville could easily add their culminating experience courses. The database will allow continual and reliable community connections, thus furthering the engagement of the university in the community

Designing and Teaching Multidisciplinary Project-Based Courses to Satisfy the ABET 2000 Engineering Criteria

One important educational outcome required of any engineering programme, as per ABET 2000 Criteria 3, is the ability of engineering graduates to function in multidisciplinary teams. In order to address this requirement, the curriculum committees of the engineering programmes at Indiana University-Purdue University Fort Wayne (IPFW), Fort Wayne, USA, have designed several multidisciplinary project-based courses. These courses involve computer, electrical and mechanical engineering students. Five multidisciplinary project-based courses, which are distributed over the freshman, sophomore and senior years, have been developed and implemented. In these courses, real world multidisciplinary design experiences are used to prepare IPFW graduates to enter today’s workforce. In this article, the authors present a brief description of these courses along with the authors’ experiences in the development and teaching of the five multidisciplinary project-based courses

Two-Semester Agile Systems Engineering Design Course: Investigation and Exploration of Immersive Training Technologies

The teaching of systems engineering is a daunting task that involves the development of curriculum capable of teaching students the systems engineering process, the design aspects of engineering, and the interdisciplinary knowledge of a variety of fields. Design is widely considered to be the central or the major distinguishing activity of engineering1. Design can be considered as the center of system engineering, in which engineers employ an interdisciplinary approach to design effective solutions to meet social needs. However, systems engineering requires that traditional academic boundaries be crossed and intertwined with other fields of engineering as well as business, socio-political, and other disciplines that clearly interacts with or are directly affected by the system under consideration. Systems engineering requires different design thinking, as it requires in depth knowledge often beyond the traditional engineering classification boundaries. For example, an electrical engineer must also in many cases have knowledge of software engineering, or safety engineering when designing a cell phone circuit

Outdoor operations of multiple quadrotors in windy environment

Coordinated multiple small unmanned aerial vehicles (sUAVs) offer several advantages over a single sUAV platform. These advantages include improved task efficiency, reduced task completion time, improved fault tolerance, and higher task flexibility. However, their deployment in an outdoor environment is challenging due to the presence of wind gusts. The coordinated motion of a multi-sUAV system in the presence of wind disturbances is a challenging problem when considering collision avoidance (safety), scalability, and communication connectivity. Performing wind-agnostic motion planning for sUAVs may produce a sizeable cross-track error if the wind on the planned route leads to actuator saturation. In a multi-sUAV system, each sUAV has to locally counter the wind disturbance while maintaining the safety of the system. Such continuous manipulation of the control effort for multiple sUAVs under uncertain environmental conditions is computationally taxing and can lead to reduced efficiency and safety concerns. Additionally, modern day sUAV systems are susceptible to cyberattacks due to their use of commercial wireless communication infrastructure. This dissertation aims to address these multi-faceted challenges related to the operation of outdoor rotor-based multi-sUAV systems. A comprehensive review of four representative techniques to measure and estimate wind speed and direction using rotor-based sUAVs is discussed. After developing a clear understanding of the role wind gusts play in quadrotor motion, two decentralized motion planners for a multi-quadrotor system are implemented and experimentally evaluated in the presence of wind disturbances. The first planner is rooted in the reinforcement learning (RL) technique of state-action-reward-state-action (SARSA) to provide generalized path plans in the presence of wind disturbances. While this planner provides feasible trajectories for the quadrotors, it does not provide guarantees of collision avoidance. The second planner implements a receding horizon (RH) mixed-integer nonlinear programming (MINLP) model that is integrated with control barrier functions (CBFs) to guarantee collision-free transit of the multiple quadrotors in the presence of wind disturbances. Finally, a novel communication protocol using Ethereum blockchain-based smart contracts is presented to address the challenge of secure wireless communication. The U.S. sUAV market is expected to be worth $92 Billion by 2030. The Association for Unmanned Vehicle Systems International (AUVSI) noted in its seminal economic report that UAVs would be responsible for creating 100,000 jobs by 2025 in the U.S. The rapid proliferation of drone technology in various applications has led to an increasing need for professionals skilled in sUAV piloting, designing, fabricating, repairing, and programming. Engineering educators have recognized this demand for certified sUAV professionals. This dissertation aims to address this growing sUAV-market need by evaluating two active learning-based instructional approaches designed for undergraduate sUAV education. The two approaches leverages the interactive-constructive-active-passive (ICAP) framework of engagement and explores the use of Competition based Learning (CBL) and Project based Learning (PBL). The CBL approach is implemented through a drone building and piloting competition that featured 97 students from undergraduate and graduate programs at NJIT. The competition focused on 1) drone assembly, testing, and validation using commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) parts, 2) simulation of drone flight missions, and 3) manual and semi-autonomous drone piloting were implemented. The effective student learning experience from this competition served as the basis of a new undergraduate course on drone science fundamentals at NJIT. This undergraduate course focused on the three foundational pillars of drone careers: 1) drone programming using Python, 2) designing and fabricating drones using Computer-Aided Design (CAD) and rapid prototyping, and 3) the US Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) Part 107 Commercial small Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (sUAVs) pilot test. Multiple assessment methods are applied to examine the students’ gains in sUAV skills and knowledge and student attitudes towards an active learning-based approach for sUAV education. The use of active learning techniques to address these challenges lead to meaningful student engagement and positive gains in the learning outcomes as indicated by quantitative and qualitative assessments

Interdisciplinary Graduate Experience: Lessons Learned

Engineers interact in the workplace with technical peers in other disciplines at all stages of design, development, and application. Awareness of the constraints and needs of the other disciplines can be key in many situations. Such interdisciplinary activity and the associated communication are facilitated if the all participants have a solid knowledge of discipline-specific terminology and an understanding of connecting concepts. Consequently, experience relating to interdisciplinary teamwork is a necessary component of engineering education. The Smart Engineering Group at the University of Missouri-Rolla was established to conduct interdisciplinary research and to create interdisciplinary educational resources. The topical interest area is smart structures which requires the integration of materials, structures, sensing, signal processing, manufacturing, etc. The interdisciplinary research and educational activities of the group, the assessment of those activities, and the experiences of several graduate students will be described. The effectiveness of collaborative student work was tied to the students- understanding of the needed synergy and their comfort with cross-disciplinary communication. Also, an interdisciplinary course, which grew out of the group-s experiences, provided systematic preparation for graduate research projects. The role of this course will be discussed as it relates to the quality of collaborative experiences from both student and faculty perspectives