Enhancing the Quality of Student Research by an On-going Multiple-Project-Based Course

Abstract

With the continued advances in computational intelligence over the several decades, it is becoming increasingly vital that development of a new course curriculum on computational intelligence and soft computing in a university will contribute to technology advancements and applications With the advance of increasingly faster computing hardware and cheaper memory chips, computational intelligence, a relatively new field of application in engineering, is becoming increasingly important in many engineering disciplines including robotics. ELEE4400/5400 Computational Intelligence Techniques that is a new curriculum teaches Electrical Engineering students to understand basic computational intelligence techniques including neural networks, bioinspired systems, fuzzy logic, simulated annealing, genetic algorithms and swarm intelligence. It aims to design, model, and simulate computational intelligence models for engineering applications, especially, research on mobile robotics. It is important to emphasize that this course differs from the traditional theoretical-based engineering course. The main focus is on teaching students to perform engineering and research projects to meet the required specifications while applying computational intelligence techniques for autonomous robots or other applications.