Integrating highly-capable corobots into a computing curriculum

Robots are typically used at the college level either as a pedagogic platform for introductory programming or for more advanced courses in robotics. With robots becoming cheaper and more plentiful, personal interactions with them will become more commonplace. This project therefore takes the position that undergraduate computing students need the opportunity to explore core computing concepts in a robotics context. Specifically, we will give students the ability to work alongside teams of highly capable and easily programmable corobots, a term used to identify robots that work side by side with humans, rather than being completely autonomous and isolated. A modular approach is used to incorporate corobotics into various computer science (CS) courses such as first-year computing, networking, and data management, thus permitting the students to see these corobots in multiple contexts. This work-in-progress paper describes the corobotics infrastructure that has been developed, and outlines how this infrastructure can be used to support diverse courses in the CS curriculum.