Competition benchmarking to design and program mobile robots

This contribution describes the planning and the development of laboratory activities for an introduction to Robotics, as well as some experiences and results obtained from them. The activities have been applied in the course “Introduction to Robotics Engineering”, during the academic year 2015-16. This course is scheduled in the first year of the novel Robotics Engineering Degree offered by the University of Alicante, and it is the first contact of many students with Robotics. Thus, the main aim of these laboratory activities is to introducing basics concepts relating to the working, designing and programming of robots, while students develop their practical skills to resolve engineering problems and face off typical implementation troubles. Along the course, each team of students has to make a little mobile robot, which be able to resolve some situations on a proposed circuit, using adequate sensors and actuators. In addition, at the end of the course, teams have to compete to resolve the circuit considering time and faults. For making the robots, robust commercial kits with an Arduino based controller are available for students.

I. Introduction

The work described here is framed in the course “Introduction to Robotics Engineering”, during the academic year 2015–16. This course is scheduled as a compulsory subject in the first year of the novel Robotics Engineering Degree offered by the University of Alicante [1]. This is the first year that the degree and, thus, the course are being offered. The course has 6 ECTS (European Credits), including 30 hours of lessons, 15 hours of laboratory, and 15 hours for visiting local industries or laboratories, in addition to 90 hours of work outside of class. Lessons and laboratory experiments are complemented with visits to local industries or research laboratories who uses robots for different sectors.