Campus Kart: An Automated Guided Vehicle to Teach Using a Multidisciplinary Approach

Typically, undergraduate engineering courses include the development of a final project, which integrates the main concepts studied during the term. Although these projects devise some relevant academic advantages, since the students can apply the theoretical knowledge into practice, they still have important shortcomings: 1) projects are constrained to artificial scenarios not linked to real-world needs and 2) developed prototypes are conceived from a single perspective isolated from other disciplines. It is well known that issues like the pressure to comply the course syllabus and time-constraints caused by other project course or the academic load, discourage professors and students to innovate and explore multi-disciplinary projects that focuses on current needs by real-world customers. The work presented in this paper summarizes the lessons learned from a multi-disciplinary engineering project that aims to fulfill a need from an actual customer. During one semester, senior students from four different majors (mechanics, mechatronics, industrial design, and information technology) designed, built and tested a functional prototype for an autonomous vehicle to provide guided tours inside the campus area to visitors, the project was named Campus Kart. Throughout the project development, four teams worked to integrate a common solution from different perspectives to elaborate this prototype, which satisfies the customer requirements. The proposed engineering academic approach is described from planning, development to validation phases, and finally from the lessons learned useful best practice guidelines are proposed.