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Design and Development of an Auto-fetch Dog System Using a System Engineering Approach in an Electrical Engineering Master’s Capstone Course

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Conference

2018 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Location

Salt Lake City, Utah

Publication Date

June 23, 2018

Start Date

June 23, 2018

End Date

July 27, 2018

Conference Session

Systems Engineering Division Technical Session 1: Course Design & SE Competencies

Tagged Division

Systems Engineering

Page Count

16

DOI

10.18260/1-2--30258

Permanent URL

https://peer.asee.org/30258

Download Count

405

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Paper Authors

biography

John M. Santiago Jr. Colorado Technical University

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Professor John Santiago has been a technical engineer, manager, and executive with more than 26 years of leadership positions in technical program management, acquisition development and operation research support while in the United States Air Force. He currently has over 16 years of teaching experience at the university level and taught over 40 different graduate and undergraduate courses in electrical engineering, systems engineering, physics and mathematics. He has over 30 published papers and/or technical presentations while spearheading over 40 international scientific and engineering conferences/workshops as a steering committee member while assigned in Europe. Professor Santiago has experience in many engineering disciplines and missions including: control and modeling of large flexible space structures, communications system, electro-optics, high-energy lasers, missile seekers/sensors for precision guided munitions, image processing/recognition, information technologies, space, air and missile warning, missile defense, and homeland defense.

His interests includes: interactive multimedia for e-books, interactive video learning, and 3D/2D animation. Professor Santiago recently published a book entitled, “Circuit Analysis for Dummies” in 2013 after being discovered on YouTube. Professor Santiago received several teaching awards from the United States Air Force Academy and CTU. In 2015, he was awarded CTU’s Faculty of the Year for Teaching Innovations. Professor Santiago has been a 12-time invited speaker in celebration of Asian-Pacific American Heritage Month giving multi-media presentations on leadership, diversity and opportunity at various military installations in Colorado and Wyoming.

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biography

Jing Guo Colorado Technical University

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Dr. Jing Guo is a Professor in Engineering Department at Colorado Technical University. She is the course director in circuits and electronics area. She taught variety of underrated and graduate courses including capstone design in Electrical and Computer Engineering area.

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Abstract

The paper describes the shift in emphasis in the University’s Master of Science in Electrical Engineering program, as well as details of the capstone course which had been used for the assessment of the program. This change attempts to provide a balance between extensive technical detail and the design and development process. This balance illustrated by the creation of an Auto-Fetch Dog System by one student. The capstone uses the Vee Model to describe the systems engineering process and develop weekly deliverables to helping students practice systems engineering. A detailed description of weekly deliverables and rubric for the Critical Design Review are described elsewhere1. Two perspectives of the Vee-Model are described to provide a holistic perspective of system-level thinking2-4.

This 11-week capstone project involves dog ownership having a number of benefits. Those who own dogs benefit from improved health, improved mood, and lower stress, just to name a few examples. Of course, owning a dog comes with quite a bit of responsibility, and can be frustrating at times, especially if a dog is poorly behaved. Bad behavior can sometimes lead owners to give up on their dogs, and perhaps leave them at a shelter. If an animal shelter can’t find a new home for a dog quickly, they will often have to euthanize the dog.

The paper summarizes the capstone project with the following items to help remedy dog behavior issues: (1) problem statement and need, (2) system requirements, (3) product description, (4) users, (5) environment, (6) Auto-Fetch system providing a subsystem overview, including the launching mechanism, electro-mechanical System, sensor suite, user interface, ant logic circuit (7) launcher calculations (8) design tradeoffs of the launch method, electric motors and sensors (9) cost estimate, and (10) system operation. The paper provides samples of selected student deliverables for this project.

Santiago, J. M., & Guo, J. (2018, June), Design and Development of an Auto-fetch Dog System Using a System Engineering Approach in an Electrical Engineering Master’s Capstone Course Paper presented at 2018 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition , Salt Lake City, Utah. 10.18260/1-2--30258

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