STANDARD COMMERCIAL EDUCATION ROBOTIC PLATFORM: INTERMEDIATE SOLUTION TO TEACHING ROBOTICS

Teaching robotics to students at the beginning of their studies has become a huge challenge. The solution to that challenge could be simulation environments where students can interact with simulated robots and have the first contact with robotic constraints.

From our previous experience with simulation environments it was possible to observe that students with lower background knowledge in robotics where able to deal with a limited number of constraints, implement a simulated robotic platform and study several sensors.

The question is: after this first phase what should be the best approach? Should the student start developing their own hardware? Hardware development is a very important part of an engineer's education but it can also be a difficult phase that could induce discouragement and loss of motivation in some students.
Considering the previous constraints and first year engineering students' abandonment rate it is important to develop teaching strategies to deal with this problem in a feasible way.

The solution that we propose is the integration of a low-cost standard robotic platform WowWee Rovio as an intermediate solution between the simulation phase and the developed of the students own robots. This approach will allow the student to keep working in robotic areas such as: cooperative behavior, perception, navigation and data fusion. The WowWee Rovio community provides an open-source Application Programming Interface (API) in C, C++ or python that will allow the student to develop software to control the robot and accessing its sensory data. The robot's main features includes a video camera, a distance/collision IR sensor, odometry information of each omniwheel and a truetrack sensor from NorthStart to 2D localization.

The propose approach proved to be a motivation step not only for the students but also for the teachers. Students and teachers were able to reach an agreement between the level of demand imposed by the teachers and satisfaction/motivation of the students.