The goal of this project is to develop a series of undergraduate courses that showcase robotics and vision, a series that will allow the sharing with undergraduate students the excitement and possibilities of this important and developing area. It is hoped that this can serve as a model curriculum for other universities across the country. The courses will emphasize both theory and practice; students will be required to design, implement, and debug systems that embody the theoretical robotics science covered in the course. A key requirement for effectively teaching the courses is a state-of-the-art robotics and machine vision laboratory. Since it is financially infeasible to supply each student with a state-of-the-art robot, they will build a distributed educational computing environment, where costly sensor and control systems are accessible from a number of student workstations on a shared local are network. In addition to work-stations, major equipment subsystems for experimentation include a robotic force- control arm with gripper, a mobile robotic platform with drive system, vision, and ultrasonic sensors, and a real-time controller. They will use the equipment to perform experiments in part-recognition and manipulation, robotic assembly, and task-level hand-eye robot systems
