Introduction to Robotic Systems Education Kit

Course Aim

To produce students with a solid introductory knowledge on robotics and key practical skills required to program and control a robot to interact with its environment and perform simple manoeuvres.

Learning Outcomes

• Knowledge and understanding of:
  • The basic definitions, concepts and design elements of robotic systems.
  • The features, benefits and functions of the Arm Cortex-M7 processor architecture.
  • The processor memory map, endianness and instruction set syntax of the Arm Cortex-M7 processor.
  • The concepts of interrupts and exceptions and the processes of handling both.
  • The key characteristics, elements and concepts of Robotic Operating System (ROS).
• Intellectual
  • Describe the key components and functions of power supply in autonomous cars.
  • Explain how a DC motor works and show how a single FET switch can be used in design of motor controllers.
  • Describe the applications of different motor controller topologies and pulse-width modulation for velocity and steering control.
  • Describe and explain the applications of optical sensing in the following autonomous robot operations: velocity measurement and line following.
  • Describe how control theory can be used for designing autonomous cars.
  • Describe how a robot can navigate in a strange environment using SLAM.
• Practical
  • Write a C program that calls subroutines written in assembly language and use suitable tools for debugging.
  • Analyse CPU timing behaviour via a debug tool and user-defined signals.
  • Program a microcontroller to output a pulse-width modulated signal (PWM) to control the voltage supplied to an LED.
  • Program the robot to move forwards and backwards in a straight line by calling motor specific libraries.
  • Write a program to use data from infrared sensors to control the robot to do line following.
  • Install ROS and perform basic operations on a robot such as obstacle detection and keyboard control.
  • Apply basic ROS computation graph concepts that enable communication between nodes.
  • Use ROS computation graph to implement a line following and obstacle avoidance self-driving robot.
  • Use ROS to simulate and practically demonstrate both SLAM and autonomous navigation operations on a robot.
  • Implement a voice-controlled robot in ROS using speech-to-text libraries.

Syllabus