Mobile robotics as the platform for undergraduate capstone electrical and computer engineering design projects

Research grade mobile robots are no longer restricted to robotics laboratories. Now that they are available and affordable through several vendors, they can be used for undergraduate capstone electrical and computer engineering design projects. Several important educational considerations have supported this decision, including: providing students with a platform for their projects that enables integrating both hardware and software development as well as dealing with real-time programming issues. We present our experience in using the AmigoBot from ActiveMedia for capstone senior design projects. Our work has focused on integrating a variety of sensors to the robot control architecture, most notably the integration of an IEEE 1394 Firewire - digital CCD camera. That in turn has enabled students to develop and test computer vision algorithms. Additional system capabilities included wireless communication of video streams captured by the digital camera. Integrating the ability to remotely control the AmigoBot can also enable using it for indoor surveillance applications.