Small Autonomous Mobile Robots for Teaching Introductory Programming to Engineering Students

Spirit and Opportunity, the mobile robots or rovers on the surface of Mars, motivated the construction of a fleet of rovers with various capabilities and sensors to be used to teach introductory programming.The rovers were designed and built by the students in our EE senior level robotics class using mostly off-the-shelf components.The rovers were designed to be programmed to achieve a series of predefined tasks autonomously such as line following, wall hugging, and pick and place.The rovers were integrated into the introductory computer science class for engineers to involve students with practical applications of physics and math.The curriculum and projects were designed to provide a hands-on technical problem solving experience in a programming class in order to increase the retention of the concepts taught.This paper provides an overview of the rovers and our experiences when they are deployed in the classroom.