A problem-based learning approach was chosen for a new senior elective in microsystems. The problem posed to the students was to design microrobots suitable for the new ldquonanogram leaguerdquo of the international RoboCup competition, which challenges teams of students and researchers to construct microscopic untethered robots that will compete against each other in soccer-related agility drills on a 2.5 mm by 2.5 mm playing field. The approach was shown to increase student interest and motivation. The course was considered a success and will be repeated with some modifications to increase the breadth of the course coverage.

There is a real need to educate our engineering students in the application of electronics, controls, mechanics, and software; this multidisciplinary initiative has led to the creation of an undergraduate Mechatronics courses at the United States Military Academy (USMA) and many other universities around the world. The focus of these courses is to emphasize application and hands on laboratory work in general, and design projects in particular. This paper presents an example of an open-ended autonomous unmanned ground vehicle (AUGV) project that has been developed in support of the undergraduate mechatronics course at USMA. This is a one-semester course that culminates in a project that occupies the student's in class, laboratory, and at home assignments for the last five weeks of the quarter. The paper will present the design, development and pedagogy of the project.

In this paper, the authors present their experience in planning and curriculum development for a course in Robotics and Machine Intelligence. The authors discuss issues, solutions, and recommendations regarding administration of the course, robotics equipment used, student activities, and outcomes assessment. Future plans for the course, as well as ideas for other similar courses, are also outlined.

This is paper summarizes an interdisciplinary, fourth-semester, undergraduate course where the development of a small, all, autonomous robot serves as the focus application. The disciplines of microprocessors, programming, digital and analog electronics, mathematical modeling, dynamical systems, and control theory are the elements of this course. The aim of the course is to teach the basics theory and how to complete the engineering design project from specification to working model of the specified product. During the course students work in teams and build the robots, which perform a compulsory task and a free task. The course ends with a competition - 3 STARS Robot Race. The competition, to design the best robot, is one of the most important motivation factors. We summarize with a discussion of the evaluation results and the students’ own opinion of this learning method.

We describe a comprehensive program using educational robotics as a hands-on, constructionist learning environment, integrated into teaching across the undergraduate computer science curriculum. Five courses are described in detail. For the three courses which have been offered multiple times, evaluations were conducted to assess students’ attitudes towards the robotics-based curriculum. These results are presented here. Lessons learned are shared, and new directions for the future are highlighted.

Robotics is a unique educational tool for many reasons including its ability to inspire students and motivate them to be creative. This paper presents our experiences in designing and teaching introductory robotics courses in Qatar and Ghana, two contexts in which robotics is not established and computing technology is in its early stages of impact. We discuss the motivation, challenges, approach, impact, similarities and differences in teaching robotics in these two settings. We highlight lessons learned from these experiences that are generally applicable to robotics education in emerging technology regions

Introduction to Mobile Robot Programming is a new project-based course taught at Carnegie Mellon University in Qatar to undergraduates early in the curriculum. We describe the course details and relate our experiences and observations. We believe that this course is a valuable introductory computer science course; however, its success requires a significant time commitment from the instructors. The value lies in this course’s ability to add breadth and computational thinking skills that will aid the students as they progress.

We present an approach to teaching autonomous robotics to upper-level undergraduates through the medium of embodied games. As part of a developing course at Brown University, we have created the Roomba Pac-Man task to introduce students to different approaches to autonomous robot control in the context of a specific task. Roomba Pac-Man has been developed using commodity hardware from which students explore standard methods in robotics, namely subsumption, localization, and path planning. Our development of Roomba Pac-Man is founded upon grounding robotics in an compelling and accessible application in a noncontrived real-world environment in a manner than can be reproduced, giving students a sense of ownership.

A first generation of mobile robots able to cope with the high uncertainty of natural environments is starting to emerge. As a consequence, there is an increasing need for theoretical and practical courses that can formally teach the state of the art of the technology. This paper describes our experience teaching a mobile robotics course as part of our computer science curriculum for undergraduate students. The course has a strong experimental part, where the goal is to provide the students with a set of hand-on experiences using real mobile robots. In particular, we show how using a simple differential drive mobile platform and a low cost visual sensor, it is possible to teach the topics that are currently most relevant to the area of mobile robot programming for autonomous navigation. The course starts by illustrating low level control routines, such as locomotion, and simple behaviors, such as obstacle avoidance and target tracking in non-structured environments. Then, as the course moves to higher level tasks such as localization and mapping, the real world becomes too complex and a more structured world is needed. A structured world, called MazeWorld is then presented where we are able to illustrate high level topics using limited perception capabilities. In addition to the main parts of the class, we also describe the perception algorithms that we developed to achieve autonomous navigation in non-structured environments and in MazeWorld. Our experience indicates that the course is highly motivating for the students. They are able to reinforce several topics from the computer science curriculum and they learn the basis for advanced coursework, research, and the development of applications in robotics and related fields, such as, artificial intelligence and computer perception

CMRoboBits is a course offered at Carnegie Mellon University that introduces students to all the concepts needed to create a complete intelligent robot. In particular, the course focuses on the areas of perception, cognition, and action by using the Sony AIBO robot as the focus for the programming assignments. This course shows how an AIBO and its software resources make it possible for students to investigate and work with an unusually broad variety of AI topics within a single semester. While material presented in this article describes using AI-BOs as the primary platform, the concepts presented in the course are not unique to the AIBO and can be applied on different kinds of robotic hardware.

We describe a number of efforts to engage university students with robotics through teaching and outreach. Teaching runs the gamut from undergraduate introductory computer science to graduate-level artificial intelligence courses. Outreach involves collaborations between students and New York City public school classrooms. Our efforts have always involved team-based projects that culminate in demonstrations or competitions, usually based on challenges from RoboCupJunior. Several research projects have followed from these initiatives. Here, we relate some lessons learned and outline new research avenues that we are pursuing to overcome some of the issues.

When one talks about the elements needed for the next generation of engineering students, a list of the keywords typically includes the following: active learning, integrated learning, just in time instruction, theory versus practise, written and oral communication, multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary teams, lectures, tutorials, laboratories, workshops and design projects. An elective course in mechatronics engineering at Queen’s University is put forward as an example of how one course can encompass all of these elements, and equally important, be able to promote the excitement and enthusiasm among the students for the subject in a manner that should be present in all engineering courses.

Robotic Autonomy is a seven-week, hands-on introduction to robotics designed for high school students. The course presents a broad survey of robotics, beginning with mechanism and electronics and ending with robot behavior, navigation and remote teleoperation. During the summer of 2002, Robotic Autonomy was taught to twenty eight students at Carnegie Mellon West in cooperation with NASA/Ames (Moffett Field, CA). The educational robot and course curriculum were the result of a ground-up design effort chartered to develop an effective and low-cost robot for secondary level education and home use. Cooperation between Carnegie Mellon's Robotics Institute, Gogoco, LLC. and Acroname Inc. yielded notable innovations including a fast-build robot construction kit, indoor/outdoor terrainability, CMOS vision-centered sensing, back-EMF motor speed control and a Java-based robot programming interface. In conjunction with robot and curriculum design, the authors at the Robotics Institute and the University of Pittsburgh's Learning Research and Development Center planned a methodology for evaluating the educational efficacy of Robotic Autonomy, implementing both formative and summative evaluations of progress as well as an in-depth, one week ethnography to identify micro-genetic mechanisms of learning that would inform the broader evaluation. This article describes the robot and curriculum design processes and then the educational analysis methodology and statistically significant results, demonstrating the positive impact of Robotic Autonomy on student learning well beyond the boundaries of specific technical concepts in robotics.

The paper describes the teaching experience gathered along four years, including the choices of robotics platform, simulator, typical experiments and projects we have conducted for students. We also discuss our efforts and plans to develop a hands-on laboratory course for the education in Robotics and Automation. The course is designed to the multidisciplinary and can be offered for engineering and non-engineering students. In order to offer hands-on experience in operating the robots and design of manufacturing works cells, a fully-equipped robotics laboratory has been established to provide basic as well as advanced experiments, to address the needs of students at different education levels.

This paper considers `Introduction to Engineering Design-Mobile Robotics,' a first year course in the undergraduate engineering programme at Trinity College. A highlight of the course is a team-based semester-long project in which students design and build fire-fighting robots and participate in the international robot competition. Course contents, hands-on learning experiences, and assessment methods are described. Course assessment and evaluation showed that it exposed first-year students to practical and philosophical dimensions of engineering design, successfully addressed many basic ABET outcomes, and elicited a positive student reaction.

This paper describes a flexible method of teaching introductory robotics. Students program an autonomous mobile robot to complete a set of tasks of increasing complexity, including multirobot tracking. Two proximity detectors (1 b each) and a pair of photosensors (2 b each) provide six sensory inputs to logic circuits, which control two drive motors and two internal memory flip-flops. The robot brain is a digital logic circuit programmed by loading an AS CH code that specifies the logic circuit configuration, similar in approach to a field-programmable gate array. The logic circuit design evolves with task complexity. Two internal set/reset flip-flops can be used to design a finite-state machine to implement a memory. One novelty of the method is that students develop and test their logic circuits on a Web-based graphic simulation before downloading the code to an actual robot. The simulation is written in JavaScript to acquire sensor readings and control robot motors to interact with the environment in a flexible manner. The simulation is downloaded with the Web page and runs smoothly on the client's machine, eliminating the need for high-speed connections. The ASCII code producing successful simulation performance is downloaded to an actual robot through a printer port on a PC in the robot laboratory. A microcontroller on the actual robot interprets the ASCII code in the same manner as the simulation. Classroom experience indicates that evolving a robot brain is an effective teaching tool and students enjoy applying logic circuit design to program a robot.

Mechatronics is integration of mechanical systems, electronics and intelligent computer control. With advances in computing power, size, and cost, university mechatronics courses can offer more flexible, powerful and up-to-date development environments than traditionally available with pre-packaged robotics kits such as the widely used handy board platform. Goals and constraints of teaching graduate-level mechatronics courses to an educationally diverse class of students are discussed. Goals include identifying the purpose of a mechatronics course, educational background of the students, effects of recent technologies on course subject matter, and ideal development environment to create autonomous robots. Constraints arise because of conflicts between two major aspects of mechatronics, mechanical systems and computer systems, and the need to balance these areas in complexity and ease of use for students of diverse backgrounds. Brigham Young University's prototype solution of a PC/104 platform with digital I/O and analog inputs running Linux and communicating via 802.11b Wi-Fi is discussed.

In this paper we describe an approach in teaching of robotics in the professional university program at University of Electrical Engineering Maribor, Slovenia. Developing a proper teaching method was not an easy task as the robotics is interdisciplinary, rapidly evolving field. The problem also is that the students often lacks in necessary mathematical and physical knowledge. We overcome the problem by introducing a set of demonstration exercises, simulations and laboratory exercises that are closely linked with the lectures. Our aim was to give students an engineering experience by practical work on the modern equipment as well as necessary theoretical knowledge in robotics.

This paper introduces the Trinity College Fire-Fighting Home Robot Contest (TCFFHRC), evaluates the curricular impact of the contest at university and high- school levels, and provides examples of student projects inspired by the contest. We evaluate the contest by analyzing participant survey data from the 2000, and 2001 contests, and we present our conclusions about the educational benefits of developing a robot for this competition.

This paper describes a new first-year engineering course, ENGR 120: Introduction to Engineering Design--Mobile Robotics, which immerses students in a highly motivating team-based engineering design experience--development of an autonomous, competitive, fire-fighting mobile robot. This course also introduces students to design as it is practiced in industry and to the philosophical dimensions of engineering design. The paper presents results of assessment surveys and student comments about their experiences in ENGR 120, and it relates course learning outcomes to the ABET basic outcomes.

For many years the courses in the subject of robotics have been held at universities all over the world. These courses have ranged from the introduction in the field of robotics to advanced courses digging deep into some special aspects of robotics. The field of robotics is vast and in this thesis I will concentrate as much as possible on courses that use LEGO to build robots, in which the relevant robotics theories are taught. The main aim of this thesis is to analyse some of the courses that have been held and to evaluate what the students have gained in comparison to other methods of teaching students in this area.

The hands-on, heads-on laboratory component to a new robotics course described here provides a self-learning experience for engineering and computer science undergraduates , enriching their robotics education and teaching interdisciplinary teamwork.

The field of robotics moves so quickly and encompasses such a wide range of disciplines and applications that education in robotics must be adaptive and incorporate a multidisciplinary approach. The key is to provide an education in the fundamentals--as best we can define them-- while maintaining strong connections to current research results. To build these connections we are integrating current robotics research into both the classroom and summer research projects. This kind of integration brings benefits both to us as robotics researchers and the students as future roboticists. Our vehicle for motivating and directing the students during the summers of 1998 and 1999 has been a national robot competition. This goal has provided motivation, given us hard deadlines, and encouraged teamwork among the students. It has proven to be a successful way to balance research and implementation within the time frame of a summer project.

The authors describe three modular, half-semester courses that constitute the emerging undergraduate robotics curriculum at the University of Illinois. They also present two software systems that are currently being tested in these courses. These systems allow students to make progress, unrestrained by occasional hardware inaccessibility and undaunted by implementation details which have been an issue in the past. Students are also able to run their own solutions in parallel with actual solutions. For example, a student could run a forward kinematics solver while simultaneously observing the isomorphic operation of the physical robot. Furthermore, use of these systems provides an opportunity for students to design and implement solutions to real-world problems within the course of a semester.

The benefits to using robots in the artificial intelligence and robotics classrooms are now fairly well established. However, most projects demonstrated so far are fairly simple. In this paper we explore advanced robotics projects that have been (or could be) successfully implemented by undergraduate students in a one-semester or two-semester course. We explore what makes a good undergraduate advanced project, why such advanced projects are now possible, give example projects, and discuss the benefits of such projects.

Attempting to convey concepts and ideas in the subject area of robotic manipulators from within the confines of a static two-dimensional printed page can prove quite challenging to even the most gifted of authors. The inherently dynamic and multi-dimensional nature of the subject matter seems better suited to a medium of conveyance wherein a student is allowed to interactively explore topics in this multi-disciplinary field. This article describes the initial development of an online robotics course “textbook” which seeks to leverage recent advances in Web-based technologies to enhance the learning experience in ways not possible with printed materials. The pedagogical approach employed herein is that of multi-modal reinforcement wherein key concepts are first described in words, conveyed visually, and finally reinforced by soliciting student interaction.

This paper presents three different ways to include robotics into the undergraduate program. The three possible ways are robotics classes, AI classes, and programming classes. The author believes that using robots in classrooms can greatly motivate students’ interests in robotics, AI, and more general, computer science. The paper first describes the appropriate hardware and software platforms for each class, and then discusses the challenging issues of using robots in classrooms.

In this paper we describe an extracurricular approach to experimenting with robotics. We argue that university computer clubs are a good place for students to experience robotics outside the computer curriculum. Robot competitions are one way in which computer clubs can become involved with robotics. Some venues are more suitable than others for student university computer organizations. We describe the current state of RoboCup-inspired ELeague soccer and why it is a good match for these types of organizations.

The purpose of this paper is to encourage those instructors who teach Robotics from a Computer Science perspective to include a taste of homogeneous transforms and robot kinematics in their classes. I include some supplemental resources that can help in this endeavor, and some ideas for how to incorporate these topics into mobile robot projects.

In this paper, we discuss the design and engineering of the C-P30, a custom robot design at Cal Poly State University, San Luis Obispo. This robot is designed by undergraduate computer engineering students at the university. This robot project is intended to be continually developed as students enter and leave the project. In addition, working on the project allows the students to fulfill a university senior design experience requirement. As this project is a continual work-in-progress, this paper outlines the current state of the hardware and software design. This paper covers the technical aspects of the robot design, as well as the educational objectives that are achieved.

The Mobile Robot Programming Laboratory course has been taught at Carnegie Mellon University for the past twelve years. It is a problem-driven class designed for students with little or no experience with robots. In this paper, we first present the current status of the class, and show how it improves the education and training of students in a robotics curriculum by giving them a hands-on experience with a real robot. We show that, in addition to core subjects such as perception, action and cognition, students also have the opportunity to learn advanced topics such as reinforcement learning and multi- robot coordination. We then discuss the evolution of the class under general categories: hardware and programming environ- ment, team experiments, and assignments. We present important lessons learned in each category, and how they affect the learning experience of participating students. We conclude by discussing future opportunities.

From a Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence perspective, Robotics often appears as a collection of disjoint, sometimes antagonistic sub-fields. The lack of a coherent and unified presentation of the field negatively impacts teaching, especially to undergraduates. The paper presents an alternative synthesis of the various sub-fields of Artificial Intelligence robotics, and shows how these traditional sub-fields fit in to the whole. Finally, it presents a curriculum based on these ideas.

Santa Clara University's Robotic Systems Laboratory conducts an aggressive robotic development and operations program in which interdisciplinary teams of undergraduate students build and deploy a wide range of robotic systems, ranging from underwater vehicles to spacecraft. These year-long projects expose students to the breadth of and interdependence among engineering disciplines, the span of processes in a system development lifecycle, and the challenges of managing a development process. Over the past five years, this program has provided more than 150 students with exposure to computer science and engineering topics, including software engineering, algorithm development, human-computer interface design, and artificial intelligence. This program provides exciting and compelling educational opportunities for students, offers real-world applications that naturally motivate the need for specific computing technologies, and serves a broader research and development program that utilizes the functional robotic systems to support externally-funded science and technology demonstration missions. The experience of the authors, as well as formal program assessment data, show that this program provides strong student motivation for learning, offers comprehensive and valuable educational experiences, and enhances student performance. This article reviews the Santa Clara robotics program, highlights the role of computer science and engineering in several projects, and presents the assessment data showing the positive results of this program.

Monte Carlo Localization (MCL) is a robust, probabilistic algorithm for estimating a robot’s pose within a known map of the environment. Now a crucial component of many state-of-the-art robotic systems, MCL’s simplicity, flexibility, and power make it a technique particularly suitable for an undergraduate AI or robotics classroom. Several popular low-cost mobile platforms, such as the Lego RCX and the Handyboard, lack the visualization bandwidth and/or the processing power required to effectively experiment with MCL. This paper describes a series of assignments that guide students toward an implementation of MCL on a relatively new, moderately priced platform, Evolution Robotics’ ER1. We also report on experiences and lessons learned over the past year of using the ER1 for teaching undergraduate robotics.

Since team-based projects have been proven to be an effective pedagogical tool, we have been using RoboCup challenges as the basis for class projects in undergraduate courses. This paper unifies several independent efforts in this direction and presents early work in the development of shared resources and evaluation. We outline three courses and describe the related class projects in order to make the context of our investigation clear and to make it possible for others to replicate or extend our work, and contribute to the shared resource.

Most introductory robotics textbooks have been written from the mechanical engineering perspective. These texts spend hundreds of pages studying gears, motors, sensors, and other related topics. While a computer scientist needs to know something about these topics, he or she certainly is not concerned with them to the degree that the texts cover. Meanwhile, the texts leave out many of the topics that are the most interesting to computer scientists. This paper presents some ideas, resources, and references for those who may want to teach a Junior/Senior level Introduction to Robotics course from a computer science perspective without a textbook.

A hands-on robotics project for engineering students on a handrobot and its controls using a PC and microcontroller is proposed. A trial course, in which students showed a strong interest and extraordinary enthusiasm, is presented. As an application, a simple interactive system based on the handrobot for playing the game of "Janken" is discussed. Such examples are expected to stimulate new concepts and innovations in electromagnetic micro-actuators and their control techniques, and promote the effective mechatronics higher education.

A number of universities are using inexpensive robotic platforms to teach artificial intelligence and robotics courses – for examples, see the IEEE Robotics & Automation Magazine, vol. 10, no. 2, June 2003 [1]. The LEGO Mindstorms set is one of the most popular platforms. This set is frequently chosen for its low cost and ease of use. However, most of the work being done with it is in teaching reactive robotic architectures. Other, more expensive platforms are used for the deliberative and hybrid robotic architectures. This paper explains how an off-the-shelf LEGO Mindstorms kit can be used to teach deliberative navigation, including path planning and mapping.

This paper describes the design and implementation of a new, simplified, entry-level RoboCup league and its integration into an introductory robotics and artificial intelligence curriculum. This E-League allows teams to focus on individual aspects such as hardware platform development or multi agent coordination, because the league provides modular solutions for several components and lets teams concentrate on chosen area(s) instead of requiring that all teams solve all aspects of a coordinated RoboCup team.

Robotics is an interdisciplinary area involving many disciplines taught at higher education institutions. Therefore, robots offer an excellent tool for innovative teaching of a number of different engineering subjects. To apply robots in such a variety of subjects and different scenarios, the employed platforms have to meet a number of technical as well as educational requirements such as flexibility, modularity, scalability and ease of use. This paper describes our new educational robotics framework and how we meet the technical challenges posed in such a scenario. Modular components form a robotics kit to build flexible platforms tailored to teaching and research.

In the education literature, team-based projects have proven to be an effective pedagogical methodology. We have been using RoboCup challenges as the basis for class projects in undergraduate and masters level courses. This article discusses several independent efforts in this direction and presents our work in the development of shared resources and evaluation instruments. We outline three courses and describe related class projects in order to make the context of our investigation clear and make it possible for others to replicate and extend our work as well as contribute to the shared resource.

This paper describes the work-in-progress of creating an artificial 3D environment and robot, suitable for educational simulation. A visual 3D vehicle robot, equipped with a monocular camera navigates in a physics based 3D environment, with some artificial intelligence capabilities. Students can interact with the robot, add new objects and set the robot various tasks. This multimedia tool is designed for students with very little experience with robotics, and aims at giving students unlimited access to a relatively sophisticated robotic system, incorporating artificial intelligence, with an extremely low cost compared to using real robot systems. Our current version of the simulation software has been designed to perform three main tasks, play soccer, avoid object, and wander. The simulation is being designed to closely resemble its real-world counterparts, and we hope, will ultimately become a powerful research and development tool.

We describe the possibility of using the Lego Mindstorms robots to support the ACM Computing Curriculum 2001, using them in lab exercises and projects for classes from beginning courses in programming to advanced courses in operating systems, compilers, networks and artificial intelligence. We first describe the limitations of the robots, both hardware and software, and some third-party programming environments that overcome some of these limitations. Finally, we describe our own work on a package of tools called MTM that eliminates most of the remaining limitations. MTM includes enhanced firmware that allows point-to-point communication and the reading of the machine state, a C++ API for programming the robots, and packages, in both Common Lisp and Java, for programming the robots and for remotely controlling them.

We discuss a class interface for the Khepera robot that makes the robot an excellent platform for undergraduate robotics courses and robot-based lab exercises in other courses. The interface hides low-level robot-computer communication and permits the building of derived classes that encapsulate related base behaviors relevant for higher-order tasks.

Robot manipulators have gained popularity in the past few decades with successful implementation for intelligent manufacturing in many industrial areas. This is why many colleges are now offering robotics courses. Understanding of a manipulation in robotics is difficult for engineering students because there is no direct and obvious link between what the end-effector needs to do in physical space and what the actuator does to move it robots are usually equipped with internal position sensors in order to measure the relative position of two neighboring links. So, teaching students a robotic manipulator in a laboratory, or training technical staff, is time consuming and may be an expensive task. This article presents an educational tool for robotic with flexible structure and graphical interface by using a new and useful algebra, quaternion algebra. System parameters can be changed easily under different operating conditions. Then, students may perform experiments to verify learned theory and to interpret and discuss the results without a detailed programming knowledge. Six degree of freedom (6-DOF) robot manipulators of general architecture can be solved easily with the help of this educational software with reducing general robot laboratory costs.

This article introduces Pyro, an open-source Python robotics toolkit for exploring topics in AI and robotics. We present key abstractions that allow Pyro controllers to run unchanged on a variety of real and simulated robots. We demonstrate Pyro’s use in a set of curricular modules. We then describe how Pyro can provide a smooth transition for the student from symbolic agents to real-world robots, which significantly reduces the cost of learning to use robots. Finally we show how Pyro has been successfully integrated into existing AI and robotics courses.

Mechatronics design provides an excellent project-based learning activity in engineering education. It weaves together the Computer, Mechanics, and Electrical Engineering Curriculums, forming one of the key issues in all of them. This paper proposes a design method for control of a robot that can be used as a core part of a mechatronics course. This method includes: a) a universal formal notation including the concepts of ASM (algorithmic state machine) and FSM (finite state machine), as a basic aspect of designing a mechatronics control system, and b) an interactive learning environment developed on the basis of the formal notation. In this paper, both of the above components are presented in the context of a specific mechatronics design course based on a mobile robot contest. The proposed approach decreases the gap between theoretical and practical skills of students in mechatronics thus leading to a better robot design with a better contest-related performance; improves the real robot performance; and opens up a way to enrich mechatronics lessons by increasing the number of possible tasks and projects in a class.

Robotics typically involves several objects interacting in motions that are sometimes hard to visualize without having a well-equipped robotics laboratory. Computer graphics display rendering of objects in motion an inexpensive, safe, and interactive visualization tools to assist in Robotics education. In recent years software and hardware tools have been developed in connection with the rise and development of the Internet, including several programming tools that allow easy visualization, 3-dimensional rendering of objects in motion, and virtual reality scenes. It is now possible to develop low cost, realistic-looking, virtual robots and observe their motions on a computer display from a variety of different view points. This article presents and discusses the implementation of interactive computer visualization tools for robotics analysis, design, and education.

An educational software package called RIO (Robotics Illustrative sOftware) has been designed and developed in order to provide a web-based learning environment on the subject. RIO integrates the VRML (Virtual Reality Modeling Language) model of the robot manipulator and a Matlab™ object representing the manipulator’s topology and dynamics parameters. The user interface consists of a Java applet displayed by the web-browser along with VRML model. The applet provides a connection to the remote host running Matlab™. A remote PC runs MJS- Matlab™ Java Server, which is capable of intercommunicating with Matlab™, and receives remote users connections. Matlab™ holds an object of the manipulator being studied, however the user is able to affect the Matlab™ object by means of Java applet GUI. Multi-sessions, involving several users, can be connected to the same Matlab™ object over the Internet simultaneously.

This paper describes our efforts and plans to develop a Virtual Laboratory for the education in Robotics and Automation. These efforts are characterized by the need of blending R&A subjects into a traditional Computer Science curriculum, thus forcing a specific selection of development topics. In this context, the Robotics Laboratory must provide the basic as well as advanced experiments, to address the needs of students at different education levels. In this paper, we present the development of three main applications, to support Control Systems and Robotics classes, as well as the thesis and dissertation research. Of particular interest is the effort in the area of teleoperation, preliminary to the opening (next year) of a new curriculum on Medical Informatics, in which Computer Assisted Surgery will play an important role.

Robot manipulators are described geometrically by their Denavit-Hartenberg parameters table. This article describes a package that combines recently developed Internet-based programming tools to generate three-dimensional virtual models of robot manipulators from a DH parameter table. Robot-Draw combines hypertext markup language (HTML), practical extraction and report language (PERL), and virtual reality modeling language (VRML). Internet users can generate three-dimensional robot manipulator models on their computer screens, navigate around the robot model and examine it from any angle. The package was designed as a visualization aid in robotics education and allows educators and students to easily visualize robotic structures and directly evaluate the effect of a parameter variation on the overall robot. Robot-Draw can also be a useful tool in the structural design of robot manipulators. Users with Internet connections can use the University of West Florida Robot-Draw package at the UWF Electrical Engineering web server by connecting to http://uwf.edu/ece/robotdraw.htm

The paper presents a program for robotics education that runs on standard PCs under the Microsoft Windows environment. The RobLib package is designed for undergraduate students and emphasis the fundamental aspects of robot modelling and control. The software is self-explanatory and uses menus, dialog boxes with figures and context-dependent on-line help. In this perspective, students are motivated to investigate on the workspace, kinematics, dynamics, trajectory planning, position and force control of manipulators. Based on this first experience, further studies on robotics, using more sophisticated packages and concepts, are, then, more attractive from the students point of view.

The kinematics of robot manipulators is a corner stone in the study of robotics in general. The computational complexity of the kinematics quite often prevents robotics instructors from using robots of general structure in their illustrative examples and assignments. The software discussed in this article, developed from recent research to support an undergraduate course in robotics, offers computational relief to educators and students in the study of robot manipulators with revolute joints and renders their use as classroom examples possible . Five or six revolute joints robot manipulators of general architecture can be solved easily with the help of this software.

The wide variety of robot programming languages available and their limitations can reduce the value of robots in establishing competitive industries. A solution is the use of a standard programming language and a library of robot control functions. ARCL (for Advanced Robot Control Library) is a powerful, general, and portable software library which provides robot control capability to C language application programmers. ARCL, developed by the CSIRO Division of Manufacturing Technology, supports sensor-based motion control, and has been used in projects related to force-controlled deburring and high-performance visual servoing. Robot controllers using the ARCL library have replaced the VAL-I controller on Unimate Puma 560 robots, and controlled a stepper motor robot attached to a PC. As well as real-time systems, ARCL runs off-line on Unix workstations and PCs, and can produce graphical simulation of robot motion. This paper introduces the software and its capabilities.

The design and features of microcomputer software developed for teaching robot motion concepts are presented. The experience acquired in the first semester of use in an introductory robotics course is also reported