2026 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Senior courses in higher education represent an important opportunity for students to apply their academic skills and explore their post-graduate plans. Here, technical engineering expertise needs to be balanced with “soft skills” associated with teamwork relationships. In addition, students can increase their employability skills and competencies by incorporating international experience. This is possible at a private University in Mexico, where the new educative model is designed to provide a high-impact practical experience in students by developing solid and integral competencies, in which learners are highly familiar with solving challenges linked to real world problems throughout their academic journey.
In this context, to obtain an academic degree in the school of engineering and sciences, the four-year undergraduate program is divided into the following phases: exploration, focus and specialization. Fundamental knowledge is acquired by the student in exploration stage, while core competencies are evaluated by Professors in focus stage. Moreover, during specialization phase, students select from a wide range of academic minors and research stays to strengthen their skills based on their personal interests and passions. In this stage, students under international exposure enhance their expertise and develop greater professional self-efficacy within a specialized engineering domain. Thus, considering that the implementation of academic minors and research stay with international experience for undergraduate students are not encountered in literature, this work presents two senior-level course options: 1) the academic minor titled “Autonomy of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs)”, and 2) the research stay named “implementation of advanced control strategy for UAVs”. These programs are implemented in collaboration with a Canadian company and a private University in United States.
If students select the academic minor, during the final phase of the course they visit top Universities in Toronto, Canada. Here, learners explore UAVs labs and understand how university labs are used for academic and research purposes. Additionally, they participate in an immersive experience at Quanser®, which is a worldwide leader company in educative technology products. It is worth noting that the Canadian company awards an official certificate to teams that successfully solve a real-world challenge posed by R&D Manager in charge of Academic Applications of the organization. The outcome of this academic minor includes the acceptance of a conference paper in 2025.
If students choose the research stay, the student design and implement a hierarchical model predictive control (MPC) for three-dimensional trajectory tracking using a quadrotor of Quanser®. Experimental tests were performed in real-time at the laboratory of a private university in San Antonio, Texas, with support from the U. S. Army Research Laboratory and the U. S. Army Research Office; this enhances fruitful research discussions between Professors and undergraduate students, which foster a sense of belonging to the research community. Hence, in collaboration of undergraduate mechatronics and robotics students, outcomes are: one paper published and another manuscript currently under review in Q1-indexed journals, in 2024 and 2025, respectively; this initiative led to the enrollment of two students in Master's program and one student in Doctoral program, enabling them to advance in their research careers.