Multi Disciplinary Senior Design Project: A Case Study On A Multiple Mobile Robots Project

In this paper, we present the conduct of a multidisciplinary team senior design project at the Air Force Academy (USAFA). The procedure is presented in the context of one senior design project. The project is carried out by a team made up of two senior students majoring in computer engineering, one senior student majoring in electrical engineering, and one instructor playing the roles of a system engineering major student and a system engineering management student. The instructor’s participation will help us define proper roles and academic standards for our new majors in Systems Engineering and Systems Engineering Management who will be enrolled in the senior design projects next academic year. The goal of the project is to create a group of mobile robots to search, detect, and destroy targets in an unknown environment. In addition to the design and construction of mobile robots with sensing and communication capabilities, the team must (1) solve a cooperative search problem, (2) develop appropriate communication protocols, and (3) devise strategies for multiple robots to detect and destroy targets cooperatively. To this end, each robot must operate autonomously within its environment, detect and avoid obstacles, and communicate with other robots. The project is analogous to unmanned aerial vehicles autonomously searching for and destroying targets. Once we discuss the desired learning outcomes that guided the execution of the project, we share the lessons we learned from this multidisciplinary project experience and point out important pedagogical issues observed by both students and faculty.