A modular, interdisciplinary approach to undergraduate robotics education

The authors describe three modular, half-semester courses that constitute the emerging undergraduate robotics curriculum at the University of Illinois. They also present two software systems that are currently being tested in these courses. These systems allow students to make progress, unrestrained by occasional hardware inaccessibility and undaunted by implementation details which have been an issue in the past. Students are also able to run their own solutions in parallel with actual solutions. For example, a student could run a forward kinematics solver while simultaneously observing the isomorphic operation of the physical robot. Furthermore, use of these systems provides an opportunity for students to design and implement solutions to real-world problems within the course of a semester