Mechatronics approach to teaching real-time robotics

The interdisciplinary nature of the field of robotics results in emergence of various methods for teaching robotics as a subject in engineering graduate and undergraduate curricula. Each of these methods focuses only on limited aspects that are of relevance to robotics, and only few address the need to mimic a realistic industrial robotic design and development. This article presents experiences of the authors in teaching and supervising a real-time robotics system course and a graduate project, which are given from a mechatronics perspective through introduction of a design and development project comprising various systems of a hydraulically actuated tripod platform. The various components and systems addressed in this project as well as the used development tools positively impacted the interests of the involved students to put more efforts in grasping the course materials and to build valuable hands-on experience.