Innovative robotics teaching using LEGO sets

In the last few years, robotics education has been proposed in Universities and High Schools, to take advantage of the appeal of this discipline to teach scientific subjects. Robotics education is greatly improved when classroom teaching is supported by adequate laboratory courses and experiments following the "learning by doing" paradigm. However, cost of robotic laboratory equipment is an important issue, and several low cost instruments have been developed to permit an effective teaching in robotics at an affordable cost. These learning tools have demonstrated the importance and effectiveness of hand-on experiences and of group work in robotics learning. Among the best known and most used tools for robotics teaching, there is the Legocopy Mindstormtrade set, which is normally used to develop and program mobile robots, often biologically inspired and cooperating. In this paper however, we describe our experience with using LEGO kits in the development of teaching curricula for fixed robot manipulators. We found that the LEGO set is also an excellent tool to analyze robot kinematics and trajectory planning, and we describe our experience with a laboratory course designed to address kinematic properties of fixed robots