A low cost mobile robot for engineering education

Robotic competitions are becoming widely used on education. The use of products from the market makes building robots possible at a very low-cost awakening the engineering nature of students and researchers. In this paper we present a low cost mobile robot which uses a normal laptop to guide itself through a track. The low cost robot involves the use of one or more cameras to control the position of the robot´s position relative to the environment. Motors are from battery operated screwdrivers and the interface with the laptop is based on an USB card, recently made available from a data acquisition cards manufacturer. The goal for this work is to build a large set of these robots, lend them to the engineering students and make them participate in a local university contest. Moreover, along the years, the student integrates more and more knowledge in the robot allowing it to perform as better as their knowledge increases along the course.