Humanitarian approach in final projects of undergraduate engineering students in Peru

In this paper, we present the educative and design goals achieved in the final project with a humanitarian approach of undergraduate students of the Mechatronics Engineering Program. This project is the result of the implementation of a methodology previously proposed by the Mechatronics Engineering Program of the Pontificia Universidad Catolica del Peru, IREP. This methodology involved the design and implementation of a robotic system solution by integrating goals planning, teamwork management and technical documentation in order to shape the students for real-life situations. Peru, as a developing country, has been mainly focusing in developing solutions for local problems, most of them aimed to industry. In fact, most of the final undergraduate projects have had an industrial approach. With the goal of encouraging students to test their abilities and develop solutions for worldwide problems, a final project with a humanitarian approach was proposed. First, we present the educational goals that are evaluated through these courses and the solution design goals proposed by the students. Then, the solution is presented with all its design domains. Finally, the achieved results are shown with the conclusions.