Robotics

For high school students: Introduction to Mechatronics. This course was offered for the first time in spring 2012 to a group of 17 Pre-engineering 9th grade students at Henderson High school. They built robots and programmed them to draw (or plot) simple geometric art on large canvasses.  The site that provides links to good student videos and presentations is here. You may also wish to visit our robotics resource site.

For Undergraduate and graduate students in Engineering: Embedded Robotics. This course was offered for the first time in fall 2011 to a group of 21 undergraduate students, equally divided among electrical engineering, computer engineering, and computer science.These students developed components for building low cost robots, integrated the components by semester end, and used them to draw advanced geometric art. The syllabus is found here. You may also wish to visit out robotics resource site for links to student blogs.

The embedded robotics course is scheduled to be offered again in spring 2015, with focus on building floor board games, such as Chess and Tic_Tac-Toe  using autonomous robots.  We have already built low cost robots (for about $100) and are at present working on improving robustness and preciseness of distance and angle traversed. See http://smartsystems.eng.fau.edu/precision-robotics/ .  Two visiting French graduate students developed functionality for Android phones  and Raspberry Pi relay stations to help estimate the positioning of various robots on the board game. More work will be conducted in fall 2014, in preparation for the spring 2015 course. the progress so far may be seen here: http://smartsystems.eng.fau.edu/math-with-ev3/ and http://smartsystems.eng.fau.edu/raspberry-pi/

We recently submitted a paper to the 2013 Annual ASEE Conference. Here is the accepted paper.  Here are the appendices for that paper that will not be published in the conference proceedings.