Entrepreneurship

The core principle of Entrepreneurship is to provide students with the opportunity to upstart businesses, develop products, or engage in projects to create solutions to relevant problems in our society or capitalize on business ventures with potential opportunity.

Project Design and Management is the first course of two which introduces undergraduate engineering students to their senior capstone projects. In our Fall 2022 semester, students were tasked with choosing a topic that will be their project over the course of the last two semesters. The topics chosen will predetermine the team a student is placed in with peers they would need to work with. My topic of choice eventually led to the study of Autonomous UAV flight and coordination.

In this course we are primarily instructed on entrepreneur and management skills that would train everyone in our team to carry out our project in an efficient manner. We were required to present our project proposal and objective to further give meaning and purpose to why this project is important to a larger audience. As building two drones from scratch can be costly and time-consuming, we created a Gantt chart which would allow the team to manage time in an organized and scheduled manner. Alongside the chart, funding for the project would prove to be the main issue our team faced.

While our budget proposal did allow our team to secure over $3000 by the university in the following semester, the main issue was the length of time it took for each drone part to arrive. This prevented us from being able to construct our drone ahead of schedule as certain sensors required have still not arrived. We decided to effectively use the time to develop a prototype drone preconstructed from a previous year by the Drone Club. This would in turn give us the opportunity to develop our knowledge on UAV airframe construction and circuit integration while we waited. Additionally, with any new team, one requires the ability to adjust and adapt to their peers, and we faced initial troubles in being able to have weekly meetings with conflicting schedules. Through effective communication our team designated set times every week where we could meet in person or utilize Zoom as an alternative option in case certain teammates were not able to do so.

After encountering several obstacles in our initial semester for our capstone course, our team was still able to persevere and accomplish tasks that we had planned. We were able to successfully develop a budget proposal with the necessary parts of our new Hexsoon drone kits, create a prototype to gain knowledge on drone construction and programming through the ArduPilot and Mission Planner software, and strengthen our team communication and collaboration.

With these accomplishments, our team would be able to continue the project into the following semester and achieve the overall project goal of the coordination and control of autonomous multi-drone swarms. These successes were especially significant for me as it provided me with an effective foundation in this Entrepreneurship course that would be essential in a future career which involves interpersonal communication and team collaboration.