Search and Rescue: An Educational Test-bed for Robotics Systems Integration

We present a search and rescue problem as a final project for an undergraduate-level Introduction to Robotics course. To successfully complete the project, a participating robot has to solve four sub-problems that are currently among the most actively researched areas in robotics: computer vision, manipulative robotics, localization, and multi-robot cooperation. By immersing the students in the details of these sub-problems, we aim to have them develop a deeper appreciation of the difficulties. In many cases, this experience also motivates the students to pursue research in those areas. We describe several example systems that use easily obtained hardware components such as LEGO pieces, the Handyboard, sonar, compass, CMUCam, and servomotors. However, each of the sub-problems is easily extendable to increase the complexity/creativity of the solution as well as accommodate for new and more powerful devices.