MAKER: An Entry-Level Robotic System Design Project for Undergraduates and K12
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American Society for Engineering Education, 2016. The paper describes the design, construction, and the programming process for a small-scale mobile-robot that can monitor and report the condition of a home while the homeowner is away. Through this endeavor, students can gain insight about engineering systems and how scientific knowledge and technology can blend together to provide meaningful applications to enhance our daily life. To further manifest the close relationship between different engineering fields used in real situation, a robotic project named Max2 is used to show the multi-disciplinary nature of robotics. Max2 is a service robot which can attend the household, or search for anomalous situations in the environment. This system is one example of a project for K-12 or first-year undergraduate students who want to learn the basics of robotics. For example, for the robot to be able to check whether the house light is left on while the owner is out, it needs an algorithm to navigate autonomously in the house environment. Students have to learn how to integrate the motion control and sensing capability so that the robot can estimate the surrounding environment and avoid bumping into any obstacle while moving around, as well as collecting and processing the information about its ambient environment. Furthermore, students have to learn how to set the light sensor so the robot can tell whether the light is on or not. Finally, the communication about how to send back the sensed information which is readable is another task for students to figure out. In this case students will learn Bluetooth and Wi-Fi communication protocols. The project is based on LEGO Mindstorms Kit for its flexibility and scalability [1]. This unit does not end here. Students should augment this project and develop their own robotic projects with additional functions or tasks based on this model. In addition, they should be able to extend it to other robotic platforms, for example, VEX or Arduino microcontroller in the future. In the class, we divided the project into many smaller task modules during a semester. Students learned functions of robotic components one at a time to accomplish the partial task until they finished all the modules and the entire project was completed to reach the goal as expected. The project was implemented in fall 2015 in an introductory mechatronics class, and was received enthusiastically, resulting in increased motivation to study robotics and automation, as well as mechatronics.
