Proposal of a low cost educational mobile robot experiment: an approach based on hardware and simulation

• Author(s): Gonçalves, José ; Silva, Manuel F. ; Costa, Paulo Gomes da ; Sousa, Armando
• Date: 2015
• Persistent ID: http://hdl.handle.net/10198/14376
• Origin: Biblioteca Digital do IPB
• Subject(s): Robotics; Education
• Document Type: Conference object
• Language: English
• Contributor(s): Biblioteca Digital do IPB

Description

In this paper it is presented an educational mobile robotics experiment based on a low cost mobile robot prototype and its simulation. The chosen educational robot challenge is a classical introductory experiment, that consists in following a line with a mobile robot based on the differential kinematics. The presented experiment has as goal to introduce students to the challenges of mobile robotics, initially programming a simulated robot, building a real robot and finally testing the developed code in a real robot. The robot was simulated using SimTwo, which is a realistic simulation software that can support several types of robots. Having as base the proposed challenge, a mobile robot competition was conducted as a part of the evaluation of the curricular unit of ``Systems Based on Micro-Controllers'' of the ``Electrotechnical and Computer Engineering'' course of the Faculty of Engineering of the University of Porto.