A Multidisciplinary Senior Design Project: Redsigned to Increase Interdisciplinary Interaction

An interdisciplinary team design experience has been conducted successfully for several years as part of the senior engineering laboratory effort at Western New England College. Recent modifications have been made to the project to increase the amount of interdisciplinary interaction during the project. For the past several years, students have designed, fabricated, and tested a solar-powered vehicle. This vehicle designed to transport two one-liter bottles of water uphill using wireless hobby-servos for steering control. During the current implementation of the project, multidisciplinary student teams are designing, fabricating, and testing a battery-powered electric vehicle. This vehicle’s goal is also to transport water bottles uphill. In the new design, the vehicle has speed control and steering control via wireless hobby-servos. The new design requires mechanical, electrical, and computer engineering students to work together closely to design and package the electromechanical speed controls and sensing systems on the vehicle. A major project objective of the course is to introduce the students to the design process typically associated with new product development. The approach is to have student teams develop an electric vehicle prototype that is optimized for speed while transporting payloads between two points up a sloped parking surface. The battery-powered electric vehicle must also be capable of completing a slalom course as quickly as possible. The effort requires multidisciplinary teamwork wherein mechanical, electrical, and computer engineers must work together to develop electromechanical speed control and steering systems, and a suspension system to stabilize the vehicle. The multidisciplinary design effort requires the parallel development of a performance prediction algorithm, the vehicle itself, and electrical and computer systems to gather data to validate the performance prediction.