Mahurin Honors College Capstone Experience/Thesis Projects

Department

Engineering

Document Type

Thesis

Abstract

The Institute for Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) Huntsville section invites college students to participate in their annual SoutheastCon Conference. Western Kentucky University sends a team of engineering students to the hardware competition, an opportunity for students to design and build autonomous robots. The 2019 hardware competition called for students to develop a robot that could collect and sort debris by color. This thesis outlines the project lifecycle of the WKU 2019 SoutheastCon robot with an emphasis on implemented systems engineering tools and techniques. Systems Engineering is an interdisciplinary approach to project management that focuses on treating the overall project system as a combination on subsystems. A Systems Engineering approach was applied to the 2019 SoutheastCon robot senior project in an effort to simplify and navigate the complexity of the competition challenge. This thesis will outline the competition description, rules, and guidelines to develop an understanding of the motivation for design decisions. It will outline the specifications, requirements, and design decisions directly influenced by the competition handbook. It will also discuss the prototype and final fabrication of the robot. The thesis will conclude with insight on competition performance, and how the level of adherence to Systems Engineering technique implementation may have impacted the team’s success.

Advisor(s) or Committee Chair

Mark Cambron, Christopher Byrne, Chris Keller

Disciplines

Electrical and Computer Engineering | Mechanical Engineering | Systems and Communications

Download

Share

COinS