A special graduation design was displayed in front of the stadium of the Weijin Road Campus just before the 2021 graduation ceremony on July 6. The so-called " Aero-amphibious Collaborative Unmanned Detection and Tracking Platform" is composed of unmanned aerial vehicles, unmanned boats, and unmanned vehicles. It has a highly intelligent, unmanned, convenient, and efficient collaborative system that ensures successful simulation of the whole security inspection work on campus. The platform is an innovative practice and exploration of the “project-based” multi-disciplinary collaborative teaching philosophy the university has advocated since it launched the emerging engineering education.

“The project is a result of cross-disciplinary cooperation carried out by 21 undergraduates and 15 instructors from five schools. Different from traditional graduation designs which lack systematic arrangements, this project has a clear goal of multi-disciplinary cooperation. Students were divided into five research groups focusing respectively on formation control, information coordination, target recognition, scheduling and visualization, and energy optimization. It took them 110 days to complete the platform,” said Professor Xie Hui from the Unmanned Driving Interdisciplinary Research Center, “What’s most important, I think, is that during the designing process, students learned from and inspired each other, and had this new and exciting experience of completing an integrated engineering system with joint efforts.”

Professor Gu Peihua, Director of the university’s Emerging Engineering Education Center deemed the project as a reform of undergraduates’ graduation design. He proposed that the designing process cultivated students' sense of teamwork, expanded their multidisciplinary vision, and helped build engineering leadership and team leadership.

“It also innovates the evaluation model of graduation design, which now comprises a graduation thesis, a test report, video displays, and physical displays, enabling an all-round, full chain sublimation of students' ability,” Prof. Gu noted.

It is reported that the new engineering graduate design project is co-sponsored by the Emerging Engineering Education Center, the Unmanned Driving Interdisciplinary Research Center, Qiushi Honors College, Xuanhuai School, School of Mechanical Engineering, School of Precision Instrument and Optoelectronics Engineering, School of Electrical and Information Engineering, School of Microelectronics, and College of Intelligence and Computing.

By Ren Xiangyun

Editor: Eva Yin