Hands On Robot Design In An Introductory Engineering Course

Our course ‘Introduction to Engineering Design’ is aimed at freshmen students entering Mechanical and Aerospace engineering. The course is structured as a 2-credit lecture coupled with a 1-credit design laboratory. While the lecture presents an overview of the profession, engineering design and methods, small student teams conduct a structured hands-on design project in the lab. Each team develops an autonomous robotic vehicle to perform assignments such as terrain navigation or collection of objects. Students find the robot project highly motivating and voluntarily spend several afternoons weekly working in the lab. The design course ends with a competition among participating teams at the end of the course. Through the design project the students gain valuable experience in professional design, engineering practice, and teamwork. Additional course objectives are student recruitment and retention, i.e. we seek to attract a broader range of students, including those from underrepresented minorities, to the Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering program. Background and History Prior to the fall 2002 semester, the design project segment of the freshman course ‘Introduction to Engineering Design’ comprised a conceptual design by a team of three to four students. Students would design a solution for an engineering problem, creating several alternatives, selecting evaluation criteria and performing some analysis. These design projects followed a customary format as described in introductory textbooks such as Eide et al [1], Voland [2]. Because the projects remained purely conceptual, the students would not typically devote much energy or motivation to their assignments. Rather, they tended to treat the design project as another obligation required for passing. Motivation levels among students were somewhat low, resulting in a dropout rate averaging about 20% from the enrollment levels at the beginning of the semester. As is well known from numerous studies, e.g. Parsons et al. [3], motivating learning environments for engineering students are characterized by features such as: • Hands-on creative design • Direct feedback to the student (usually by experiment), either as confirmation of success, or as guidance towards improvement. • Encouragement of creativity and rewarding excellence. Many engineering colleges have restructured their freshmen curricula to reflect these insights and make their programs more attractive and rewarding. Following a series of presentations on P ge 825.1 Proceedings Of The 2003 American Society For Engineering Education A nual Conference & Expos ition Copyright 2003, American Society for Engineering Education the use of robots as instructional tools (see [4] through [9]) at the ASEE 2002 conference in Montreal, the author decided to include hands-on robot design into our freshman engineering design course. The main objectives were to increase student motivation and recruitment as well as to enhance students’ abilities in the crucial areas of problem solving, teamwork, project planning and execution. A comprehensive discussion of typical first year learning objectives is presented in Davis et al. [10]. By designing and programming a mobile robot, the freshmen engineering students learn techniques for problem solving in a challenging and rewarding setting that addresses a majority of the learning objectives listed by Davis et al. [10]: • Computer control of processes (timing sequences, response to sensor signals) • Design concepts for autonomous robotic vehicles (controller, motors, sensors, system integration) • Team work • Programming skills Design project objectives In the design project the students learn to structure a project systematically, to search for pertinent literature, to create and evaluate multiple designs, and to work in teams. Each team designs an autonomous vehicle using CAD software and other design analysis, and develops and tests the robot controller software so that the vehicle can perform the required operations on its own. Training in solid modeling CAD software is not an objective of the design course. Solid modeling is taught separately. At the end of the semester, each team documents its efforts in a written report and an oral presentation before the class. The design course ends with a robot competition and prizes for the winning team.