Expanding Student Engineering Experience Through Building an Astromech Droid

In this work, we outline the start of a project to expand engineering interest at our campus robotics club: the development of an autonomous Star Wars astromech robot. This project involves students from various undergraduate engineering majors and the overall goal of this project is to adapt our autonomous navigation software stack into a new robot that will be constructed over the next 2 academic years. During Fall 2021, a large number of the students arriving on campus were new, many of whom had not stepped on campus before. We use this project to aid in student development - both technically and in their acclimation to campus life. The student club lost many upperclassmen during the 2020–2021 academic year and we outline how we organized the newer students into functioning groups.