Introduction of mechatronics to undergraduate students based on robotic platforms for education purposes

The rapidly increase of personal robotic platforms and their applications in Japan represents a great challenge for universities to introduce undergraduate students the basic knowledge required to develop intelligent automated mechanisms. For this purpose; in this paper, we are presenting our approach to introduce first year undergraduate students of the Department of Modern Mechanical Engineering the basics of robotics systems. In particular, the details of curricula of the Mechatronics Laboratory (1) and (2) are explained. In both lessons, the students receive lectures of the content of each proposed topic and then, a set of practical experiments are done. On the other hand, in order to foster the creativity of undergraduate students of engineering fields, we focused in developing an education tool designed to introduce at different educational levels the principle of developing mechatronic systems. In particular, the development of an inverted pendulum mobile robot Waseda Wheeled Vehicle No. 2R (WV-2R) has been proposed. Regarding the Mechatronics Laboratory, questionnaires were proposed to obtain information from the students about their impressions of the lessons. From the comments collected from the questionnaires, we observed the advantages of the proposed curricula to introduce them about robot technology. On the other hand, different kinds of experiments were proposed to confirm the possibility of implementing controllers as well as changing physical properties of the system to observe differences on the response of the system.