I designed and built a fully working general purpose autonomous system, with an acoustic tracking system to demonstrate its independent nature.
Of course it is a bit cliched to build a robot for your university project, hence the guise of 'autonomous system' which is actually a more industrially used name.
It does still have some academic and industrial merit but I just wanted an excuse to build one as that is my dream engineering job ^^ .
Here is my demonstration video, I am quite proud of what I achieved with a old windows phone and movie maker despite the low resolution.
I am using a National Instruments myRIO if anyone is interested, the project cost me under £100 but I won the myRIO (thanks NI) so I don't know what the total is. Nothing you cannot do with a Raspberry Pi or and Arduino though.
Anyway... I hope you found it interesting.