Introducing robotics at the undergraduate level
Sam R. Thangiah, S. W. Joshi · 1997
At the undergraduate level there is a need to expose students to the complexities of programming robots to accomplish real life tasks. This paper outlines how a course in robotics can be taught at the undergraduate level with specific experiments that allow for incremental learning in programming a mobile robot. The experiments can be conducted using either a commercially available robot or by simulating the actions of a robot. In addition, the minimum functional capabilities required of the robot to conduct the experiments and implementation of two experiments are described. Introduction Many of the undergraduate classes in computer science deal with programming with respect to specific problems in which the environment under which they have to be tested remain static. That is, students learn to write programs to solve a problem with respect to a given set of data. Programming a mobile robot requires students to allow the mobile robot to perform autonomous navigation. Autonomous rob...