Randall D . Beer , Hillel J . Chiel , and Richard F . Drushel Using Autonomous Robotics

f you walked into our Autonomous Robotics class at Case Western Reserve University on a typical day, you might be surprised to find 30 college students from a variety of engineering and science disciplines sitting on the floor surrounded by LEGO blocks. Appearances can be deceiving; this course tackles serious issues in engineering and science education. In this course, students design, build, program and test their own autonomous robots that participate in a public competition. This course uses robotics to foster a hands-on, interdisciplinary, teamwork-oriented approach to the synthesis and analysis of integrated real-world systems, as well as teaching new approaches to robot control. Created in 1995, our Autonomous Robotics course grew out of ongoing research on biologically inspired robotics at CWRU [3]. The design of this course draws heavily on technology developed at MIT, first for K–12 education [11] and later for an undergraduate course similar to ours that has been offered since 1990 [8]. Related courses have been developed at the University of Edinburgh [7] and elsewhere. Two features of our course distinguish it from these other courses. First, our final competition is considerably more technically demanding. Second, we address a much broader set of educational goals. Our course attracts students from computer engineering and science, biology, electrical engineering, neuroscience, systems engineering, biomedical engineering, and physics. In this article, we describe the educational goals of the course, its overall design, the final competition, and student assessment.