Engineers are increasingly required to have the ability to work with complex, integrated systems, which often include mechanical, thermal, and electrical components, as well as microprocessor control. As is the case in many undergraduate engineering programs, students at Ohio Northern University (ONU) currently have limited exposure to such systems. ONU is working with a faculty member at the University of Notre Dame (ND) to adapt a graduate-level Intelligent Systems course recently developed at ND, and implement it as an undergraduate course at ONU. In this course, consisting of classroom lectures and hands-on, multidisciplinary laboratory projects, students learn to model and control a variety of complex systems. This course is designed for both mechanical and electrical engineering students who have completed a controls systems course. As part of the course, ONU students are implementing an algorithm to control an experimental system at ND. Likewise, ND students are doing a similar project to control a system at ONU.
