On First-Principle Robot Building in Undergraduate Robotics Education in the Robotic System Levels Model

Robotics has widespread applications throughout industrial automation, autonomous vehicles, agriculture, and more. For these reasons, undergraduate education has begun to focus on preparing engineering students to directly contribute to the design and use of such systems. However, robotics is inherently multi-disciplinary and requires knowledge of controls and automation, embedded systems, sensors, signal processing, algorithms, and artificial intelligence. This makes training the future robotics workforce a challenge. In this paper, we evaluate our experiences with project-based learning approaches to teaching robotics at the undergraduate level at Miami University. Specifically, we analyze three consecutive years of capstone design projects on increasingly complex robotics design problems for multi-robot systems. We also evaluate the laboratories taught in our course “ECE 314: Elements of Robotics”. We have chosen these four experiences since they focus on the use of “cheap” first-principled robots, meaning that these robots sit on the fringe of embedded system design in that much of the student time is spent on working with a micro-controller interfacing with simple and cheap ac