Session 9C1 A Modular, Interdisciplinary Approach to Undergraduate Robotics Education

The field of robotics is interdisciplinary by nature, and aa a result, university robotics curricula tend to be distributed across various departments, typically within the College of Engineering. This arrangement poses a number of problems: (1) resources, particularly laboratory equipment, are difficult to obtain, since in many cases several departments are competing for a single, limited set of resources; (2) there is much duplication between the various introductory robotics courses, resulting in an inefficient utilization of faculty teaching resources; (3) even the introductory courses are not interchangeable, since each department’s courses tend to spend considerable lecture time on specialty topics, of interest only to the specific discipline. We have developed a set of modular robotics comes and laboratories to help solve the problems listed above. The key to our approach is the use of half-semester comes. The first half of the semester is used to provide a single, general introduction to fundamental concepts, and the second half is used to treat discipline-specific topics in detail. Our current robotics curriculum (which is still in the experimental stage) consists of three courses. The first course in the sequence is a half-semester course covering the fundamentals of robotics (homogeneous transformations, kinematics, and dynamics). This course is supplemented by a laboratory section that exposes students to state-of-the-art robot simulation software and industrial grade robot arms. The current laboratory facilities for the course are a combination of resources from several departments, including Electrical and Computer Engineering, General Engineering, and Mechanical and Industrial Engineering. For the second half of the semester, students are encouraged to register for one or more half-semester courses covering more specific topics. Currently, we are offering a course on dynamics and control, and a course on computer vision. We hope, in future semesters, to add a number of additional half-semester courses, sponsored by various Engineering departments. Fir nally, the Graduate curriculum contains a number of advanced courses, which will require as prerequisites an appropriate se: quence of these half-semester courses. ?? The organization of this paper is as follows. We begin by e briefly describing the three half-semester courses that are cur2 rently being offered. We then present a description of some of the laboratory facilities, and the associated educational soft; ware packages that we have developed. w w