REDSTONE ARSENAL, Ala. (Feb. 18, 2025) – Mentorship offers the opportunity to help shape and improve not only the day-to-day present, but more importantly the future.
The U.S. Army Combat Capabilities Development Command Aviation & Missile Center’s Software, Simulation, Systems Engineering & Integration directorate recently had the opportunity to do just that in a partnership with Tennessee Technological University that put future engineers’ skills to the test.
This capstone initiative began in spring 2024 with two competing senior design teams of electrical, computer and mechanical engineers at the university. Students initially began with a competition rulebook with a goal of designing a small-scale interceptor that could fire upon an object traveling on a predetermined path. Each team was tasked to design an interceptor from concept to implementation with constraint factors of overall size, projectile material, and projectile travel distance. Students were provided with subject matter experts, or SMEs, from S3I that they met with on a biweekly basis to provide status updates as well as design breakdowns, decisions and questions about the rules.
The initiative gave the future engineers real life perspectives and offered challenges to test their knowledge.
“My biggest takeaway was seeing how key communication was in each capstone design,” mechanical engineering student Ishak Lamei said.
Lamei also mentioned that failure was inevitable and necessary to learn what was working, as well as, what was needed to be improved to achieve success with the project. Every student pointed to communication as being one of the major contributors to their success, but also the setbacks experienced throughout the project.
“We assigned each other sections and did not look at connecting it all together until after we turned it in,” said electrical engineering student Colby Drake.
Once the team received feedback that their project was not meeting expectation, it forced them to more closely communicate to make sure all the details of their design were aligned for success.
Capstone participants applied skills learned in the classroom, but to achieve their goal they had to apply out of the box thinking.
“A lot of classes prepare you for the project while capstone had a more 'figure-it-out' mentality,” said electrical engineering student Savannah Metzler.
The capstone initiative greatly benefits students by allowing them to interact with engineering professionals to solve difficult problems. S3I SME Dedra Moore was happy with what she saw from the future engineers.
“The participating students did a good job combining classroom knowledge with novel real-world techniques to design and build mechanisms with direct applicability to Army interests,” Moore said.
The competition consisted of rounds with increasing difficulty. The line in which the object, a golf ball, traveled was known in the first two rounds, but was random in every subsequent round. Teams could stop gameplay at any time. Once gameplay was stopped, teams score totals were taken along with their cost to manufacture to determine their final scores.
S3I will be continuing the capstone initiative in spring 2025 with a new project working with the electrical and computer engineering department as well as the computer science department. The objective will be to design a GUI and a robot that has the capability to dispense communication cable between two points specified by the GUI.
In addition to fostering a learning experience, educational outreach such as these helps the Center build its bench while developing potential SMEs of the future.
“Students' interest in working for DEVCOM AvMC has increased by ten times since the start of the initiative,” said AvMC’s Sawyer Hall.
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As part of the U.S. Army Combat Capabilities Development Command, a subordinate of the U.S. Army Futures Command, DEVCOM Aviation & Missile Center serves as the Army’s primary center for developing, integrating, demonstrating and sustaining Army aviation and missile systems. For more than six decades, DEVCOM AvMC has delivered cutting-edge aviation and missile technologies and it continues to drive the advancement of future capabilities to ensure war-winning future readiness and battlefield dominance.
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