A Comprehensive Experiment To Enhance Multidisciplinary Engineering Ability Via Uavs Visual Navigation

This Research to Practice WIP presents a UAVs visual navigation based comprehensive experiment to enhance multidisciplinary engineering ability in Aerospace engineering education. In traditional courses, aerospace-related disciplines are independently distributed in different courses, and there is rarely a hands-on platform which includes signal processing, control theory, and artificial intelligence into Aerospace engineering. Facing this problem, this paper designs a multidisciplinary comprehensive experiment, aiming to provide a hand-on platform and flexible project-based program to students of aerospace engineering professions. First of all, in order to let the students understand actual aerospace problems, a multidisciplinary simulation platform containing UAVs and remote objects scenarios is constructed for them to explore in the experiments. Second, the content of the experiment is designed into three stages including data acquisition and processing, conceptual design and simulation, in-flight validation, during which the multidisciplinary engineering ability runs through the whole process of the activities. Finally, Project Oriented Design Based Learning is also introduced here to combine engineering design education with innovation and creativity. Through the project demonstration and presentation at the end of the experiment, the multidisciplinary engineering ability of each student can be effectively evaluated. The UVN comprehensive experiment enables students to work on real-world aerospace engineering problems through a hardware-software integration framework, which may greatly stimulate their curiosity and interest in autonomously learning. It also provides students unprecedented opportunities to immerse themselves in projects that cross disciplinary boundaries, improve their professional ability and enhance their exploration competence in aerospace areas.