An Interdisciplinary Platform for Undergraduate Research and Design Projects

Students in the engineering and technology programs are challenged to thoroughly apply their learned technological knowledge and skills toward design and implementation of a challenging engineering project. In this paper, a platform for comprehensive interdisciplinary designs, which utilizes a synergy of competencies gained from undergraduate academic and research experiences with insight to the efforts concerning design project is presented. The platform is based on an interdisciplinary process for design and implementation of various unmanned aerial vehicle systems that involve airframe configurations, propulsion, computing components, camera and vision systems, sensors, actuators, autopilot functions, and data collecting components. This interdisciplinary platform provides students with experience in design, selection, integration, calibration, programming, and applications that require learning and knowledge from various fields of engineering and engineering technology. A number of projects that have been developed based on the platform in an undergraduate unmanned vehicle systems course in an engineering technology program are discussed.