Robot Programming Laboratory

We are requesting financial support for the hardware side of a newly designed interdisciplinary course, the «Robot Programming Laboratory», for Fall 2013.

A major challenge in robotics is to design reliable and efficient software that exploits the full power of modern robotics hardware. ETH students so far have little exposure to it: MAVT students typically do not go into the depth of software techniques, and INFK students do not learn robotics. In the Robot Programming Laboratory, students from both origins will learn software engineering principles and methods, robotics software architectures, and coordination and synchronization methods. They will program a small, commercially-available robot with sensing, planning and control. They will improve their performance by completing tasks in phases and receiving feedback on their progress, and demonstrate their cumulative learning and software development savvy at the semester-end competition.

The Robot Programming Laboratory is the first course of its kind at ETH, and has few counterparts elsewhere. Innovedum’s financial support for the robotics components will ensure that this new, interdisciplinary course provides students the high-quality learning through hands-on experience and help us bridge the gap between robotics and software engineering curricula at ETH.

The course will be divided into several phases. Evaluation will include both continuous assessment and end-of-semester assessment: at the end of each phase, we will evaluate whether students have met the goals set for the phase; at the end of the semester, we will evaluate the achievement of the learning objectives. This will help us evaluate the course’s quality and identify areas of possible improvement. We will also survey the students, and the survey will include questions about the style of the course and the content of the course so that we can improve in both areas. The course’s final competition is a key component of the end-of-semester evaluation: we may consider a student successful if s/he successfully completes the final competition tasks.

The main novelty of the course is the combination of software engineering and robotics. ETH courses in or related to robotics focus on pure robotics topics and do not touch on the software engineering component of robotics. Software engineering courses deal with topics in software engineering and typically do not cover any robotics applications. This course will bring good software engineering practices to robotics and give students an opportunity to apply their knowledge in practice. The proposed course is a stand-alone course and will complement existing ETH courses that emphasize theory.

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