Academics

EECS 200: Electrical Engineering Systems Design I

Instructors: Dr. Leland Pierce

Coverage
This laboratory introduction to electrical engineering is centered around a societally-relevant design challenge for a 2-wheeled robot platform. Apply electrical engineering concepts in circuits, computing, control, sensors, optics, power, signal processing, and wireless communications to a system such as a robot, and adapt the system to achieve competition objectives within defined engineering constraints. The first eight weeks of the course will explore subsystems that allow the robot to sense, think, and act, and the second eight weeks will require student teams to revise and adapt a robot to achieve objectives set forth by the competition, while operating within specified constraints. 

Lab
The labs will consist of giving the students hands-on experience with electric machines (AC and DC), power electronic circuitry, and control algorithms for electric drives.

Textbook
No textbook required.

Syllabus
Pre-requisite: ENGR 100 and ENGR 101 
Co-requisite: EECS 215 

Grading: 
In Class Quizzes: 20%
Lab Reports (Individual): 40%
Final Project (Team): 40%

Robot Competition: 
This laboratory introduction to electrical engineering is centered around a societally-relevant design challenge for a 2-wheeled robot platform. The objectives and constraints of the robot competition will change every semester. The first eight weeks of the course will explore subsystems that allow the robot to sense, think, and act, and the second eight weeks will require student teams to revise and adapt a robot to achieve objectives set forth by the competition, while operating within specified constraints. 

Labs: 
Weekly laboratory sessions will apply concepts from lecture to build, operate, and analyze a 2-wheeled robot; and to later adapt the system for the robot competition. During the first eight weeks, student teams will focus on the various subsystems of the robot to build components, understand operation, and to measure and interpret output. The remainder of the lab sessions will be focused on revising the system to meet objectives of the competition. 

The construction, measurement, and analysis of the subsystems in the first eight weeks will have accompanying lab reports. While the lab experiments will be done in teams, the lab reports will be submitted on an individual basis to provide each student the opportunity to interpret and analyze the operation of the subsystems.

Final Project: 
A project plan and a final report for the project will be required for each team. The project plan will define engineering requirements to meet goals of the competition, a plan for testing, and a timeline to complete work. The final report should include a description of the overall robotic system, a description of approaches taken in the design to achieve competition objectives and associated design tradeoffs, an analysis of the performance of the robot in the competition, and recommendations for improvement. 

Topics:

• Systems-level constraints and tradeoffs, computing
• Motors, power, torque, velocity, controllers
• Robot positioning, encoders, odometry, closed-loop feedback
• Control
• Distance ranging, sensors, time of flight, microcontrollers
• Obstacle avoidance, path planning, debugging, finite state machines
• Sensing living objects and temperature, circuits, signals/noise
• Digital cameras, imaging optics
• Robot control – sense, think, act
• Engineering tradeoffs