Integrating Collaboration, Hands-On Experimentation, and Student Leadership into Introductory Robotics Education

Lyness, H. and Choset, H.

Introduction to Robotics has been the anchor course for Carnegie Mellon's Robotics Undergraduate Minor - and now Additional Major - since its inception in 1998. This class primarily caters to sophomores and juniors from a variety of backgrounds. While the purpose of the course is to expose students to the breadth of robotics, for most of the students, it is also their first foray into collaboration with students from other majors. The course embraces hands-on labs to reinforce the principles taught in class, as well as allow students to uncover connections between theory and practice. Each week, teams design, build, program and debug robots using LEGO building blocks and custom components to complete a specified task, one of which is demonstrated today. We hope that our walk-crawl-run structure can be adapted for a variety of disciplines to give students increasingly dynamic opportunities to apply new knowledge. 

Hannah Lyness, Robotics
Howie Choset, Robotics