The RobotChallenge - A research inspired practical lecture

This paper presents a new university course combining theoretical lectures with a robot competition. The main intention is to offer a practical course including hands-on experiences being close to current research topics in the field of mobile robotics. For this purpose, a commercial mobile robot is equipped with state of the art sensors, allowing autonomous execution of manipulation tasks. The course consists of three thematical sections. At the beginning of each, lectures provide the theoretical background. On this basis, the participants are addressed to develop algorithms and to solve specific tasks, delivered in homework packages, self-reliantly or in a team. Finally, the developed software components need to be merged to solve a predefined scenario, e.g. autonomous part handling. At the end of a thematic section, students demonstrate their developed solutions within a challenge and explain their approaches in a presentation. Starting with teleoperation and object recognition, the RobotChallenge ends up with navigation in unknown terrain. Besides others, the participants acquire soft-skills, such as project and team management. Being carried out for the first time in winter term 2011/2012, the RobotChallenge successfully promotes profound understanding of mobile robotics that is applied during practical experiences. It turns out, that aspiring to win competions lead to a high motivation of the students w.r.t. development of appropriate solutions.