Embodied Computation: An Active-Learning Approach to Mobile Robotics Education

This paper describes a newly designed upper-level undergraduate and graduate course, Autonomous Mobile Robots. The course employs active, cooperative, problem-based learning and is grounded in the fundamental computational problems in mobile robotics defined by Dudek and Jenkin. Students receive a broad survey of robotics through lectures, weekly assignments, and a final capstone project that includes a community outreach element and collaboration with artists. Students were assessed on several metrics from the ASEE literature; overall, they performed well in the course. The outreach event was also a success and was enjoyed by both the community attendees and student participants.