Senior Capstone Design Experience: Hovering Robot

The paper describes the collective experience of a student and three mentors in creating a hovering robot in a year-long senior design project course. We present the tasks involved in identifying requirements, generating specifications, designing the overall system, implementing the design, and testing and integrating subsystems. We consider the system engineering tasks from the perspectives of both the student and the mentors. The selection of a hovering robot is based on the numerous advantages of such robots offer over fixed wing and land drones, and the growing demand for such robots in the military and in industry. The project is designed such that the student can incorporate and apply engineering skills and knowledge acquired from his core engineering and majors courses. The goal of the paper is to share the lessons we learned from our experience and report our up-to-date findings on the educational aspect, the research aspect, and the administrative aspect of the project.