Proposal of a low cost educational mobile robot experiment: an approach based on hardware and simulation

In this paper it is presented an educational mobile robotics experiment based on a low cost mobile robot prototype and its simulation. The chosen educational robot challenge is a classical introductory experiment, that consists in following a line with a mobile robot based on the differential kinematics. The presented experiment has as goal to introduce students to the challenges of mobile robotics, initially programming a simulated robot, building a real robot and finally testing the developed code in a real robot. The robot was simulated using SimTwo, which is a realistic simulation software that can support several types of robots. Having as base the proposed challenge, a mobile robot competition was conducted as a part of the evaluation of the curricular unit of ``Systems Based on Micro-Controllers'' of the ``Electrotechnical and Computer Engineering'' course of the Faculty of Engineering of the University of Porto.The authors would like to thank all the persons involved in the robot competition, to the students for their effort while participating in the robot competition, making it competitive and fun, to the referees, that supervised the competition,and also to the team mentors, that helped and inspired the participating teams. This work is financed by the ERDF European Regional Development Fund through the COMPETE Programme (operational programme ) and by National Funds through the FCT Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia (Portuguese Foundation for Science and Technology) within project FCOMP-01-0124-FEDER-037281.