Autonomous robot: An intellectual way of infusing microcontroller fundamentals into sophomore students

Use of microcontrollers has become inevitable in almost every field of engineering. Thus in our program, we have adhered to the idea that knowledge in microcontroller fundamentals is necessary for all types of engineering majors. However, the difficulty arises when a traditional classroom teaching with examples and non-creative projects instill boredom amongst students. Students fail to make the connection of how important this understanding will be in their future studies, be it mechanical, electrical or other majors. We feel there is a missed opportunity to engage engineering students early in their program with a highly relevant and easily tangible experience working with intellectual microcontroller-based projects. In order to improve the experience, we introduce our students to the basics using laboratory exercises on the Arduino platform and then transition to a full-featured in-house autonomous robot platform for the final project. The paper first talks about our current approach in teaching microcontroller topics to the students followed by the need to develop the autonomous robot platform. The robot platform was developed in-house by the undergraduate students using the available in-house resources. The autonomous robot utilizes a commercial chassis, wheels and tracks along with geared DC motors that include embedded quadrature position encoders. In addition to the chassis, the undergraduate students have also used off-the-shelf hardware for robot control and Arduino interface for student developed code. The paper then talks about the various kinds of laboratory exercises and projects that can be implemented on this platform by the students in their introductory digital systems course that they take as sophomores. We further include student assessment data that supports our approach and shows that the students appreciated this intellectual way of learning microcontroller fundamentals so that they can apply the concepts they have learned in a logical and sequential manner to solve practical engineering problems. Finally, we conclude the paper with lessons learned and ideas for an improved learning experience.