COMPUTER SCIENCE FOR A ROBOTICS DEGREE

In 2015, a new degree has been implemented at University of Alicante, degree of robotics. It is the first degree about robotics in Spain and one of the first degrees in the world. Although there are several similar degrees related with robotics, this one consists in a mixture between industrial engineering and computer science. The implementation of this degree has several challenges to be addressed.

In this paper, we present the methodology in the implementation and the contents of the programming subject in the degree. This implementation must be carried out keeping in mind the future subjects of the degree. Programming is a core skill for this kind of engineers but, by other hand, students have not got an acquired programming skill. So, we need to address the trade-off between implementing a traditional programming subject (limited by the limited number of related subjects) and obtaining the important programming skills.

The programming related subjects in this degree comprise: First course: programming 1 (oriented to basic programming), programming 2 (object-oriented programming), computers (technological foundations of computers); Third course: Algorithmic, Intelligent systems. As shown, students must acquire their complete programming skills in the first year.

The paper shows the experience implementing the subject Programming 1 for the first year of this degree. For the theoretical sessions, we decided to focus on mixing theoretical programming concepts with a given programming language. We adopted C as the programming language to use. The reason was this language is the most used in robotics. For example, Robot Operating System, OpenCV and Point Cloud Library are the main used libraries in robotics and all of them share C as programming language. Although other languages could be used (like Python), C is the standard for low level programming.

For the practical sessions, two projects must be carried out. The first one is guided and introduces students to programming through the development of a simple navigation algorithm. It is guided and introduces students to programming. But in the second one we propose a computer vision project, introducing the students into the computer vision world. It is worth to say that there is a Computer Vision subject in the third course. We detailed the practical proposed project.
We also present several questionnaires where students validate the course proposal and provide interesting conclusions to our work. This paper could serve as a guide for future robotics degrees.