Hands-on experiments on intelligent behaviour for mobile robots

In recent years, Artifi cial Intelligence (AI) techniques have emerged as useful nontraditional tools for solving various engineering problems. AI has thus become an important subject in the engineering curriculum. However, the design of a balanced AI course is not a trivial task as its concepts commonly overlap with many other disciplines relating a wide number of subjects and ranging from applied approaches to more formal mathematical issues. This paper presents the use of a simple robotic platform to assist the learning of basic AI concepts. The study is guided by simple experimentation on autonomous mobile robots. The presented material has been successfully tested as an AI teaching aid in the University of Guadalajara's robotics group, yielding motivation to students, increasing enrolment and retention on robotics-related courses and eventually contributing to the development of competent computer engineers