Assessment of a Multi-University Unmanned Systems Capstone Design Project

In this paper we discuss the assessment methods for a senior capstone design project involving teams from three geographically separated universities, as well as the challenges the students faced and lessons learned. The project title was the Joint Cooperative Unmanned Systems Initiative (JCUSI). Each team was tasked with developing an unmanned autonomous system operating in a different medium (air, water, and ground) to cooperatively work together to complete a mission of protecting a harbor. JCUSI is unique in that the customer funding the project will most likely employ the students involved either as engineers implementing future unmanned systems or as operators of unmanned systems. Consequently, the sponsor was involved in defining the learning outcomes of the project, which were added to our normal pedagogical outcomes for this capstone engineering design course.