Web Based Robotics: Supporting Wide Area Educational Access to Autonomous Mobile Robot

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Computer Science (31)In recent years, courses in the design and programming of mobile autonomous robots have become popular at technical institutions. These activities offer students experience in a number of practical areas, including electrical circuit analysis, computer programming, project management, and technical writing. This proof-of-concept project overcomes the previous limited availability of such opportunities, particularly in under-resourced urban areas, by providing wide access to those experiences. It is developing a complete autonomous robots course to be delivered over the World Wide Web through the State University of New York Learning Network. Students are able to develop control code for a remote robot, test the code by uploading the program over the internet, and then observe the actual robot's performance over a live video feed. The project is investigating the pedagogical techniques best suited for web-based courses in order to develop a production quality educational package for the autonomous robots course to be offered to students across the state of New York. Access to the course is provided through commonly available, inexpensive computers linked to the WWW. The formative and summative evaluation of the course conducted by an external evaluator includes comparing its effectiveness with a traditional on site course. Dissemination of the evaluation results and the course materials is being accomplished by a web site and conference presentations. An instructor's manual with syllabus and sample projects is being developed to enable other sites to adapt the course, if it proves to be successful.