The role of robotics in freshmen engineering curricula

The paper is based on the author´s experience gained from developing and teaching an interdisciplinary hands-on freshmen-level Introduction to Engineering course at Florida Atlantic University (FAU). Robotics experiments, projects, lectures and computer lab activities currently occupy 15-25% of the course´s total curriculum. These include programming of industrial robots, construction of LEGO^® Mindstorms™ mobile robots and image processing. The paper describes all these activities and their educational objectives. It contrasts the objectives of the robotics activities with the overall course objectives. The paper identifies the sources of these robotics activities, relating these to more advanced activities pursued in several senior-level courses at FAU.