A Control Systems Course Project Serving as a Bridge to a Capstone Course and Research Projects

“Control Systems” is an important course for Engineering Technology programs. An easy mistake to make in teaching the course is spending too much time in covering complex mathematical theory and solving theoretical problems. The applications of control system theory in applied research and capstone courses are sometimes overlooked by the instructors. Many engineering technology programs are requiring their faculty members to conduct more research. At Texas A&M University, engineering technology program faculty members are expected to perform well in both research and teaching. It is challenging to strike a balance between the two due to the reality of the heavy teaching load. This paper shows a practical case of how faculty members could successfully integrate teaching and research in the control systems course and a capstone course. Three faculty members at Texas A&M University formed a team and received an internal funding from the university to investigate the feasibility of using a custom-built drone platform for building safety inspection through autonomous and intelligent missions. One of the challenges is to fly a drone close to the surface of a building wall and maintain a constant distance. A course project in Control Systems was designed to let students work in a related topic: How to control a robot to follow the contour of a wall while keeping a constant distance from the wall? After taking this course, some students chose to work on a capstone project to develop a drone that maintain distance from building wall. The drone would be controlled to survey the entire surface of a building, taking pictures of the surface while recording the coordinate information. The faculty members and their graduate students would use the drone developed by the capstone team to conduct research that involves using AI to detect damages in the surveyed building. There are apparent similarities and differences between the course project and capstone project. As far as control is concerned, both projects require a sensor or sensors to detect the distance from the wall. The measured distance is used as a feedback signal to control some motors. In this aspect, the concepts of control for these two cases are similar. However, a drone is more difficult to control because it needs to fly in the three dimensional space while a robot moves around the ground. Overall, the integration of research and teaching in this case helped the faculty members’ research. At the same time, it benefitted the students in their learning in the Control Systems course as well as further learning through capstone courses. This approach of combining research and teaching can make the faculty members more productive as well as to make students to be more engaged in learning.