Robotics Focused Capstone Senior Design Course

Abstract

This work describes the educational experiences gained teaching the Senior Design I & II courses, a senior level, two-semester sequence in the Electrical Engineering (EE) program at Georgia Southern University (GSU). In particular, the authors present their experiences in using robotics as the main area to develop the capstone senior design, with focus in interdisciplinary interactions and teamwork for the design and implementation of autonomous mobile robots. Other main purpose of the capstone design course sequence is for the students to experience working in an engineering application project researching and analyzing the sustainability, ethical and social impact issues related to their projects. The students work for two semesters as a team to design, test and build a mobile robot project for a particular application. Some of these projects have been fabricated to participate in different robotic competitions, including the IEEE sponsored hardware competition, the lawn mower competition, and the robot waiter competition.