prepare for the future with Senior Design

At Mercer's School of Engineering, we believe in the philosophy "learning by doing." As such, all engineers participate in hands-on projects during their undergraduate careers, including a senior design project spanning their last two semesters at Mercer. Within this project, students are encouraged to work on interdisciplinary teams to design, build, and test a realistic engineering system with a substantial electrical component or focus. Students combine the knowledge they have gained through classes taken in various specialties to produce a comprehensive final project.

For a listing of student projects and a schedule of presentation times for the current semester, click here. To see an example project, check out the project highlighted below which is indicative of a successful project within the electrical specialization.

Senior Design Spotlight

The team designed, built, and tested an autonomous robot, pictured above, which placed fourth in competition at the 2006 IEEE Southeast Convention Student Hardware Competition.

An interdisciplinary team designed, built, and tested a robot to compete in the 2006 IEEE Southeast Convention Student Hardware Competition in Memphis, TN.

Team members Clint Doriot (CPE), Ben Huston (MAE), John Livingston (ECE), and Adrienne Lovelace (ECE) collaborated on the project.

Their project was guided by competition rules which presented the following challenge and approach to entrants:

FedEx has three flights about to leave from Memphis. One will depart in 3 minutes, one in 4 minutes, and the last in 5 minutes. Twelve FedEx packages must be loaded correctly on the three planes before they depart.

An autonomous package loading robot will extract packages, one at a time, from a stack inside the package chute. As each package is removed from the bottom, the next package drops into position onto the ramp surface until all packages have been selected. The order of the packages coming from the chute is unknown to the robot for each round. The robot will read the barcode affixed to each package to determine the airplane onto which it should be loaded. Each plane has four packages assigned to it. It is left to each team’s design strategy how to optimally get the packages onto the correct airplanes. Examples include pre-sorting, loading each package in turn on the correct plane, etc. Points will be awarded for the timely and accurate loading of packages and deducted for errors or damage.

To meet the challenge, Mercer's team constructed a robot that loaded four packages at a time and delivered them in the reverse order that the robot had extracted them due to the packages' stacking order. The robot could also estimate if there was no more time left for a given block and throw it away accordingly.

To contruct the robot, the team used two stepper motors to control the robot's movement on the field and one stepper motor for lifting the grip arm. The stepper motors, donated by Lin Engineering, were implemented using Allegro motor control chips. A servo motor was used for gripping the packages. The team used an infrared photodiode/transistor pair for line-following and tactile switches to find the package chute and position the lift arm. The barcode scanner sensor was provided by CipherLab. The main subsystems were tied together through the Atmel ATmega128 microcontroller.

The robot gave a competitive showing at the competition, placing fourth in a field of over twenty schools.

The team was very fortunate to receive donations from Allegro Microsystems, Atmel Corp, CipherLab, and Lin Engineering. These donations, along with a few other smaller donations, totalled over $850. The team extends a special thank you to the above companies as well as to Bill Campbell and Eric Daine, who helped them to manufacture the mechanical and electrical parts respectively. Finally, the team extends a special thank you to their advisors and in-house personnel, Dr. John Reece, Dr. Laura Lackey, Dr. Clayton Paul, Dr. Philip Olivier, Dr. Edward O'Brien, and Dr. Hodge Jenkins.