Industrial-Like Vehicle Platforms for Postgraduate Laboratory Courses on Robotics

The interdisciplinary nature of robotics allows mobile robots to be used successfully in a broad range of courses at the postgraduate level and in Ph.D. research. Practical industrial-like mobile robotic demonstrations encourage students and increase their motivation by providing them with learning benefits not achieved with traditional educational robotic platforms. This paper presents VEGO, an industrial-like modular vehicle platform for robotic education with an appropriate infrastructure that has been demonstrated to be very useful at the postgraduate level. Besides learning engineering concepts, in performing industrial-like exercises, students develop valuable skills such as teamwork and the capacity to solve problems similar to those they may encounter in a real industrial environment. The developed infrastructure represents a valuable platform for robotic education that can be used in many different disciplines as a way to demonstrate how to cope with the difficulties and challenges related to the development of industrial infrastructure systems. The platform evaluation proved its ability to inculcate the expected engineering skills. A novel approach is adopted through the use of multidisciplinary and close-to-industrial-reality platforms developed under an incremental approach and using an open and customizable structure.