2003-04 Course Development Fellow Gabriel Elkaim

Project Title

Development of a Hands-On Project-Based Mechatronic Design Course

Nature of the Request

This proposal seeks course relief for the purpose of creating a new class in the Computer Engineering department at UC Santa Cruz. The course relief will be used by the instructor to prepare the new class, CMPE 118 - Introduction to Mechatronics, including the course and lab materials, lab guides, and final project. This course will be a team-based, project-oriented class that is unlike anything else currently offered at UC Santa Cruz. The students will, in one quarter, learn the basics of electrical and mechanical design, and by the end of the quarter have constructed a small mobile robot to perform a task defined in the final project specification. This course will be available to anyone from any department with a sufficient background to meet the prerequisites.

Background and Rationale

UC Santa Cruz has, at present, a limited number of courses that teach students a methodological approach to systems integration. While capstone design sequences in both Computer Engineering (123A/B) and Electrical Engineering (127/8) allow students to explore these areas if they so choose, few are equipped to understand the nature of these projects. Undergraduates need a course that will equip them to take on electro-mechanical design challenges for their capstone sequence, and their subsequent careers. Additionally, in the modern engineering world, increased demands will be placed on new graduates to be able to synthesize their knowledge into realistic and robust designs. The explosion of embedded hardware—devices which contain a microprocessor—has led to a de facto requirement for engineers and scientists of all disciplines to be versatile with use of microcontrollers and electronics.

In order to address these issues, a new course is proposed that will teach students how to integrate a microcontroller into a device in order to accomplish a complex task. The focus of this course will be on the use of microprocessors as components of machines (as opposed to computer control of machines). As such, the emphasis will be on small 8-bit microcontrollers (for instance, the Motorola MC68HC11) embedded into the student project.

The overall goal of the course is to produce engineers that are conversant in all of the diverse technologies necessary to complete a modern electro-mechanical product. The intent is to teach the students enough about the mechanical, electrical, and software components that they will be able to be effective interdisciplinary team members and leaders. The philosophy of course is that the best way to learn the capabilities of the technology is to actually learn to apply it yourself.

Impact on Teaching and Learning

The class progresses from an introduction to electrical components and mechanical design and culminates with an open ended team design project that implements a small, simple microcontroller-based robot. The students will have to design the mechanisms required to satisfy the task, and then build their robot accordingly. That is, they will perform the mechanical, electrical, and software design and then build their own small robot following their design.

The class will be 10 weeks long with four structures labs. The final three weeks will be spent on a team-based open-ended design project formulated so as to promote creativity and ingenuity. The final project might, for instance, require two or more of these small robots to complete against each other in some sort of game that is played without human intervention.

The approach that will allow students to gain experience in high-level systems integration—with only 10 weeks of class—is to give them tools that allow them to work at a high level of abstraction. This will be enabled through the development of hardware and software modules for the class, to be created during the course relief. By using these tools, students will be able to concentrate on solving the larger problem, rather than having to learn the details required to design every subsystem from scratch. This is consistent with the trends in the software and semiconductor industries which have focused on supplying larger scale solutions and emphasizing code reuse. The labs—themselves hardware/software integration—will be designed to introduce the capabilities and functions of the modules available for the final project.

Exposing students to the variety of disciplines required for success in these projects will have ramifications far beyond Computer Engineering. Though some will undoubtedly be attracted to this field, others will find themselves propelled into mechanical engineering, system design, programming, electronics, or any of the many other areas of study brought together by the study of complex systems.

Experience with similar classes at other universities confirms the power of the multidisciplinary approach inherent to study in the field of mechatronics. For example, the students of Professor Ed Carryer's mechatronics class at Stanford, Smart Product Design, have been so successful at displaying imagination and creativity that an entire industry has sprung up recruiting graduates of the sequence into industry jobs. Many went on to careers at Frog Design, EDGE Technologies, Interval Corporation, and others. Student enthusiasm is so great for the course sequence that the class has a long waiting list every year. Demand for these skills is so high that an ad-hoc alumni mailing list is maintained in order for companies to recruit both new and old graduates.

Project Assessment

In addition to the course project itself, the measure of the course's success will be assessed in two fundamental ways. Firstly, the students in the class will be given initial and final quizzes to determine their basic understanding of mechatronic systems. This will test their basic grasp of the subject matter, and allow further improvements in coverage. Student feedback will be essential in shaping the future of the course. This will be accomplished both by end-of-quarter evaluations as well as using two designated student "points-of-contact" that will relay feedback during the quarter to the instructor.

The other fundamental metric for course evaluation will be student enrollment. Similar courses offered at other institutions have shown a slow start, followed by a flood of enrollments as the course developed. For example, at Santa Clara University, the initial enrollment was 18, but the next time it was offered that number rose to 51. Given the resource intensive nature of the course, it will be required to eventually limit the number of students. However, the number trying to take it will be a very good measure of its success.

Plans for Continued Funding

Once the initial course is created, along with its companion lab, it is expected that this will become a regular, and well attended class in the Computer Engineering department. Since the class forces an interdisciplinary approach and a methodological design paradigm in engineering, it is expected that students will be drawn from all branches of engineering and many of the science departments at UC Santa Cruz. The marginal cost of each additional year of teaching will be supported by the Computer Engineering department, and the lab fees of the students. The mechatronic design class is expected to become a core part of a future "systems engineering" track within the Computer Engineering department, and as such has strong departmental support.