Involving students in undergraduate research and development: two perspectives

At Trenton State College the faculty is greatly involved with introducing research and design to the undergraduate engineering students. We present two distinct but equally effective methods to reach our goals. One of the authors has successfully bought small contracts to the school that have involved a number of undergraduate students in the study of global positioning satellites, GPS. The students´ efforts had a wide range of tasks including simulating portions of the GPS payload in BASIC, modifying the BODE PLOT of the hybrid phase locked loop which shapes the spectrum of the atomic clock to maximize system timing accuracy, and simulating the GPS 24 satellite constellation spatial dynamics and the distributed AUTONAV Kalman Filter operations in MATLAB. All the students involved with this method of undergraduate involvement in research and development have gone on to obtain employment in related areas of engineering. The second author has involved a number of students in the design development and construction of a microprocessor controlled wheelchair for the severely physically challenged. Several other students have become involved with this project and have enlarged the area of development to include voice control and breath control of the wheelchair. A patent application has been submitted for the microprocessor Controlled Wheelchair. The students involved with this method of undergraduate research and development have all used their experiences to obtain employment in related engineering fields