2023 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

The “Smart Farming” project supported by the National Institute of Food and Agriculture(NIFA/USDA) and the “AIRSPACES: Autonomous Instrumented Robotic Sensory Platforms to Advance Creativity and Engage Students” project funded by the Maryland Space Grant Consortium( MDSGC/NASA) have facilitated engaging engineering and other STEM students on campus in experiential learning and research efforts in mechatronics and embedded systems applications. Sensing, actuation, and control are integral to smart devices with embedded microcontrollers. Arduino and Raspberry Pi microcontrollers and single-board computers can be interfaced with various sensors and actuators and incorporated into mechanical devices to perform a variety of intelligent functions using appropriate software programming. Over and above the multidisciplinary graduate and undergraduate students that are hired to advance the proposal objectives, project assignments integral to “Instrumentation” and “Control Systems” courses offered by the principal author to juniors in the engineering program endeavor to integrate the out-of-classroom field and laboratory efforts with the course requirements to introduce a larger pool of students to growing efforts in this field. Also, the use of take-home kits in the project assignment based on Arduino microprocessor boards allows students to engage actively and connect theory to practice on a flexible schedule. Highlights from the course project assignments, the involvement of an engineering student team with NASA’s “Rock-On” program, and other recent educational and experiential learning activities of the funded projects mentioned above will be delineated in this paper. Alignment of these efforts with the ABET outcomes and enhancement of the overall educational and university experiences of students will also be outlined.