Abstract:

Since a decade, the academic syllabus for bachelors in Electrical Engineering domain is reserving a wide area for projects. The projects represent about 10% of the final marks for the diploma validation after 2 years courses in theoretical, technical domains and its applications. The objectives are to make students more sensitive to the mixed knowledge, to manage a group rather rather giving academic lessons.

In any case, one success element of the project is laying on two facts always checked. First, the choice of the project by the students themselves and second the total availability of the teacher manager. Such an analog behaviour can be found in the purchase decision discussed by J. Dewey one hundred years ago meaning that good ideas are out of age.

20 years ago, the academic program of maths proposed to use a computer algebraic program in order to free all attendees from hard calculation. It was the starts of the DARE method still in use. It holds three major steps where the last step deals with the modelling of any electrical engineering problem. To be closer to the problem, maths authors had to discuss, adapt and share their teachings thus discover other teachings ways according to the concerned domain. That launched for years the collaborative work within sciences and applied sciences. The discussion mixing teachers of different domains in front of students make them pointing out the interest for the proposed subject. A showroom includes all current and past projects.

The first and ambitious project was to build a line tracker robot. Everything in electrical engineering from electronics to computer science and maths has been installed inside. The project took two years. Twelve students in bachelor of technology worked hard in order to compete in a place in the middle of France for a special challenge. The too sophisticated robot has been changed in another one based on Lego bricks offering more possibilities, easy programming languages and freeing the students of technical and time consuming aspects.

This has been used during many years and still now for projects, international projects and also for a one week devoted to open scholars to the science and the In that background all staff members had been enrolled. The role played by the maths teachers was to organize, manage, check the results, refresh the motivation relayed by their colleagues.

Later and thank to a student idea, a new and sophisticated project got up as a bachelor of technology course was launched in the sustainable development with new equipment as solar panels, wind power and water station. The opportunity was to design an autonomous robot taking advantages of modern elements as micro controllers, microprocessors, cheap actuators and servo motors easy to program.

But a new direction for projects has been taken since five years. Based on a small, cheap and easy to program computer, it offers a tool for doing experiments at home in electronics, computer science and also maths and vision. Coming an attractive subjects for students, the computer vision followed by the image processing is now rising in all minds. First in projects for a students coming from abroad to validate their pratical course in engineering, the computer vision interest is growing up for local students. And second on a computer vision course designed to mix maths, computer science and image processing. The method is laying on the DARE method mentioned above

Keywords:

Robotics vision, computer vision, collaborative work, project.