Engaging Students in Multidisciplinary Projects in Unmanned Vehicles Technologies for Enhanced Learning Experiences

This paper talks about innovative multidisciplinary projects on unmanned vehicles technologies at California State Polytechnic University at Pomona (Cal Poly Pomona) that are designed to increase students’ interest, involvement, retention, and performance. Many aspects of unmanned systems are not or cannot usually be taught in classroom settings. Students and/or research projects are effective ways of exposing students to the state-of-the-art in unmanned vehicles technologies. Moreover, multidisciplinary projects provide students opportunities to learn real-world problems in a team environment. The projects include many aspects of unmanned vehicles technologies such as Sense & Avoid, Computer Vision, Path Planning, Autonomous Routing and Dynamic Rerouting, Geolocation Techniques, et cetera, and involve more than 90 students from Aerospace, Electrical & Computer, Mechanical, and Industrial Engineering, and Computer Science Departments. The projects have been found to effectively engage students in learning and help develop new understanding, knowledge, and skills. The students get ample opportunity to develop theoretical understanding, by means of hands-on learning, and apply the knowledge to designing, building, modeling, simulation, and experimental testing of real-world engineering problems. It has been found, based on industry feedback, that with the involvement in multidisciplinary and real-world projects, students demonstrate increased readiness for career in the industry. Students have also shown increased interest to graduate degrees. The paper also describes the strategies to retain, recruit, and train lower level students for the multidisciplinary project, which is expected to continue for several years into the future with funding support from the Northrop Grumman Corporation. The project has succeeded in retaining the students from previous years with the retention rate being more than 90% among non-graduating students. The returning students usually assume leadership roles and help train the lower level students. The paper also talks about the outreach activities that include presentations at minority student clubs, community colleges, and high school for recruiting purposes as well as for motivating them to STEM fields. The student diversity has increased significantly compared to the first year of the project, which is currently in its fourth year.