2023 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Biola university is a Christian liberal arts university that currently offers a 3+2 Engineering Physics program in partnership with the University of Southern California. Meanwhile, we have been developing two 4-year Bachelor of Science degrees, in Engineering and Robotics respectively, to be launched in Fall 2023. This unique background sets the stage of the 5-DOF robotics arm project presented in this paper.
The Summer Engineering Internship (SEI) offered at Biola University engages students with 128 hours of hands-on engineering internship-like experience, mentored by two engineering faulty members. The program aims to provide undergraduate students, with little engineering experience, an enriching and relevant experience for their future engineering careers.
The development of a 5 Degree of Freedom (DOF) robotic arm is one of the several SEI projects involving our engineering physics students in the summer of 2022. All three students on the team just completed their freshmen year back then. They developed a complete embedded system that enables users to control the motion of four robot joints including base, shoulder, elbow, and wrist, as well as a gripper as the end effector, by simply turning the corresponding knobs/potentiometers on a custom-designed control box. This project integrated 3D CAD modeling, Arduino programming, sensors, motors, and the hardware/software interfaces to allow current amplification, multiplexing, and motor control. Students presented their design review every other week. At the school-hosted summer experience exposition, they presented the robotic arm with a poster and demonstration, and interacted with audience.
The faculty mentor is continuing this project working with three other undergraduate students through a Directed Research course, aiming at an advanced version of the robotic arm. Currently students are transforming the system to the ROS 2 platform commonly used by robot developers and researchers. Plans of integrating different components of this robotic arm in the curricula of the BS-Engineering and BS-Robotics programs are presented in this paper. We also use it as an instrument to recruit prospective engineering students and involve current students in the growth of the Engineering and Robotics programs.