Project-based learning approach in a senior level course in autonomous mobile robots

This paper describes the experiences of the authors in incorporating a project-based learning approach in teaching an undergraduate level course for engineering technology students. The course is for senior students majoring in electrical or mechanical engineering technology. Topics discussed as part of the course include PID controllers, fuzzy logic control principles, robot mechanics, sensors for mobile robots, FPGA embedded systems implementation, and robot path planning techniques. The main goal of this course is to apply the above topics to the design and implementation of an autonomous navigation robot. Working in collaborative groups, by the end of the semester students were able to have a complete functional autonomous mobile robot capable of performing search and rescue tasks. To achieve the autonomous navigation, students focused in the implementation of two different types of controllers, a PID control and a fuzzy logic based control; both controllers were implemented in an FPGA card. Students also designed a rubric to assess the performance of the two different controllers to evaluate and compare them.