A comprehensive approach to teaching mobile robotics

Abstract

Mobile robotics can be an interesting subject for many students in a variety of engineering science fields. It builds a bridge between the pure theoretical digital world and the real open environment. Several research results show that learning mobile robotics gives not only the ability to control certain types of robots but also develop many science-related attributes technical and social skills. On the other hand programming mobile robots is hard and without a good guide students are likely to lose their inspiration. For this purpose we decided to develop a set of four exercises showing mobile robotics in the accessible and comprehensive way. The tasks were prepared for two types of wheeled robots: first equipped with a webcam and second with sonar range finders. Both robots run using the ROS framework as we find it the most popular robotics tool. The exercises are also designed considering the limited budget of educational in-sintutions. Finally guides for the tasks described in this paper have been shared on-line with the robotics community.