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Interactive Sensor Package Unit – a Multidisciplinary Design Project

Abstract

This paper introduces a multidisciplinary capstone senior design project, which involves the design, build and test stages1. It is a two-semester project that was conducted by six senior students in the Department of Engineering at Indiana University – Purdue University Fort Wayne. The objective of this project is to design and build an interactive sensor package unit that can engage dogs into playing. The whole system design is composed of the shell, mobility mechanism, power source, control unit, sensor system, stimulator system and software. This paper also describes several different assessment approaches used throughout the project. The faculty members from the Department of Engineering and the local sponsors conduct the assessment. These assessments are based on either written reports or oral presentations.

Introduction

There is a void area in the toy market for pets. No interactive devices that can autonomously engage pets in outdoor play exist. In order to fulfill the requirement of outdoor operation, the toy should also be waterproof for situations such as rain or falling into a pond. It also needs to be able to move over grass and slopes with a certain amount of incline. To fill this gap, a multidisciplinary senior design team in the Department of Engineering at Indiana University – Purdue University Fort Wayne (IPFW) designed and built an autonomous system that can be used as a development platform for devices that will engage dogs into playing. This is a two- semester multidisciplinary project1 that was carried out by three electrical engineering students and three mechanical engineering students. In the fall of 2006, the students started with the formulation of the problem and then the generation of conceptual designs. After evaluating the conceptual designs, they completed a detailed design of the best conceptual design. In the spring of 2007, the students built the system and conducted the experimental testing.

There were a total of five conceptual designs generated2. The team evaluated these five conceptual designs based on the following criteria: ease of implementation, final manufacturing cost, mobility, reliability, ease of manufacture, dog appeal, etc. The two top-rated conceptual designs are illustrated in Figure 1. The conceptual design shown in (a) utilizes the principle of equilibrium to provide the unit’s motion. The theory is that if a mass of substantial weight (the battery) is displaced from the center of the unit, the unit will move to regain equilibrium. The conceptual design shown in (b) utilizes motor driven gears that will rotate the shell of the elliptical unit. The equilibrium seeking conceptual design has the advantage over the dual geared motor design in the sense that it allows for rotation on all axes while the dual geared motor design doesn’t. When the evaluation was performed, the equilibrium seeking unit ranked the highest in the critical criteria of ease of implementation, final manufacturing cost, and reliability.

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Liu, Y., & Zhao, J. (2008, June), Interactive Sensor Package Unit A Multidisciplinary Design Project Paper presented at 2008 Annual Conference & Exposition, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. 10.18260/1-2--4352