This project establishes an undergraduate laboratory for building and programming intelligent mobile robots. This laboratory is mainly used in the undergraduate courses titled Building and Programming Mobile Robots (BPMR), Artificial Intelligence (AI), and Computer Control. The BPMR course is a new course that adapts materials from the MIT 6.270 robot contest OMS+ and the course on robots taught at Stanford by Konolige to this urban university of 17,000 that has 62.7 Hispanic students. The current course on AI will be significantly modified to incorporate hands-on exercise on mobile robots. The goals behind establishing the laboratory include increasing the number of computer science majors, the number of students from the area pursuing computer science, the number of computer science graduates with a significant background in robotics, the number of computer science undergraduates involved in research, and the number of computer science undergraduates continuing on to a graduate program or to a research career. The faculty associated with this project have ongoing research programs on topics, such as reasoning about actions, planning, robot navigation, fuzzy control, and neural networks, that play a big role in creating an autonomous mobile robot. Undergraduate students, after taking courses that use the new laboratory, are able to participate in the related research programs. As a motivational tool, a team that includes undergraduate students is sent to the annual AAAI/IJCAI robot contests. Robot building workshops are provided, as are robot demonstrations for high school students and teachers and other university students. These workshops encourage a larger number of students to pursue a degree in computer science.
