Underwater robot and boat platforms in Embedded Systems and Engineering Technology Education.

Embedded systems or microcontroller application courses are typically included in the Engineering Technology Curriculum for an electronics system program.At Texas A&M University, the Electronic Systems Engineering Technology (ESET) program is offered.For the embedded systems courses that the author has been teaching, students learn about microcontroller architecture and microcontroller applications.For the class projects, students can be given comprehensive programming and project demo assignments as a class project toward the end of the course.And, some of the students would take the Capstone project courses in the following semesters.In this paper, the author presented the skills and knowledge that can be used from underwater robots and boat platforms to benefit embedded systems courses and students.In the Spring and Fall semester of 2024, a class project was given to the students as a mock-up boat platform.This ESET curriculum does not include nautical environment robot courses.However, the author adopted underwater robot technology as an applied example to help students deepen their knowledge of embedded systems.For class projects, students were given tasks to program an MSP430FR5994 microcontroller to control a DC motor and a server motor.The control data was sent over a USB cable to display the data and control status on GUI on a PC.In this paper, class projects for the mock-up boat platform will be introduced.The lessons learned through the class projects will be presented.