Case Study of a Multidisciplinary Engineering Capstone Design Project: Electric Drive Control System

This paper presents the design, development, testing, and validation of an electric drive control system for a multi-motor vehicle with independently driven wheels that can be used as a platform to test an electric car’s differential drive function. Due to the time and budget constraints, we designed the electric car with four motors and one Servo, in which each motor supplies power to each wheel and the servo uses Ackermann steering. Furthermore, the control system consists of three components: the Zigbee transmitters, the embedded system, and the electric speed controller. The testing prototype showed its potential and feasibility, and it demonstrated that it could simplify the mechanical layout of future electric cars by connecting the motors directly to the wheels and reduce the number of drivetrain components, thus improving the overall reliability and efficiency. Furthermore, the paper focuses on the systematic design process used by the multidisciplinary team in order to accomplish the project as a Capstone Senior Design project. The design project was adequately partitioned between the students from the two majors (two students from Mechanical Engineering and two from Electrical and Computer Engineering) to ensure that the entire team could contribute effectively while being able to leverage from the expertise of all team members. Based on the team’s experience and faculty interaction, future guidance on how a sustainable model for enabling multidisciplinary Capstone Design projects is also suggested.