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Introduction

Welcome to the NSF Workshop on Unified Curriculum and Course Design for Mechatronics and Robotics Engineering!

Over the course of the workshop, you will complete several of the activities from WPI's Introduction to Robotics course, culminating in a highly successful final project that we developed in response to remote learning needs under the covid pandemic.

The Project Overview describes what your robot will have to do to complete the challenge. Each of the workshop activities is designed to add functionality to your robot until it can complete the challenge.

To complete the project, you will need to prepare a few things:

• Build your robot according to the Build Instructions (which also contain a Bill of Materials).
• Construct an arena as laid out in the Project Overview. We typically use a 4'x8' white board with black tape, but you can make the arena significantly smaller, if needed. You can use any smooth, uniformly colored surface for the arena, though you will want to be sure you have good contrast between the surface and the tape used to make the course (see the preliminary activities for the second activity, Keeping on Track, for how to test the line sensors.
• You may also want to build a figure-8 out of tape. A large figure-8 (3' x 4' or so) is useful for testing, but not strictly necessary.

Format of the activities

Each of the activities includes a set of preparation activities and a set of workshop activities. Because time in the workshop is limited, you are highly encouraged to do the preparation activities on your own before the workshop. For each session of the workshop, however, we'll give you code that is ready to go for that session.

The workshop handouts also contain solutions, thing to watch out for, and pointers for what you could do in a class.