Courses:Field Robot Summer Course:Course preparations
If you have completed the first two years of your engineering or science study you have sufficient knowledge and experience to participate succesfully in this summer course. Still you might want to prepare yourself ahead to get the most out of the course, so we have made a list of relevant topics.
Please remember that you will be part of a group compiled on basis of your combined knowledge, and this is a course, so please do not be scared by the list. We do not at all expect you to be an expert in all topics :-)
The competences you will need during the course depends on the decisions regarding design and construction that you make within your group. The list of topics below is therefore only a recommendation based on experience from previous courses. Students from many different areas of study participate in the course, but in general you should be able to place yourself within one of the categories below.
Everybody
Field Robot Events
Have a look at the webpages from the previous field robot events. You will find a lot of valuable information there including proceedings from the participants.
Udacity courses
Udacity runs a series of online courses each lasting about 8 weeks. The lectures runs as short youtube clips supplemented by pdf documents and an online class forum. You have to submit homework through the web page each week. These courses are very good and relevant to the summer course. It is therefore highly recommended that you spend time following one or more of these before the summer course.
- Intro to statistics applies to everyone, especially thosee who plan on writing software for the robot. Even though it will probably mostly be background info for designers it is still worth looking into. There are some optional and very simple programming exercises as well, so if you would like to look into programming this might be a good way to begin.
- Artificial Intelligence - Programming a robotic car is a bit more advanced in terms of Python programming but the course begins at a low level making sure that nobody will be lost. It is a great course and at level with our courses here at SDU. Depending on how you learn new theory this might suit you better.
Design and mechanical engineering
Design
- Interactive design
- User centered design
- Holistic design
- Aesthetics
- Composition, shaping, drawing, graphics, color scale
- Robot design
- Connection between form, function and interaction
Mechanical engineering
- Vehicle design
- Vehicle steering principles (differential, tracked, Ackermann)
- Wheel and track principles
- Brushed and brushless DC motors
- Gears
- Servos and linear actuators
- Absolute and relative rotary encoders
Robotics, software and electronics engineering
Don't spend too much time on the list of theoretical topics before the course. The practical topics are much more relevant.
Practical
The groups will utilize our FroboMind Software Platform for field robots based on Ubuntu and Robot Operating System (ROS). This will give you a head start into the development of software for field robots, still it is very flexible and will give you a large degree of freedom to design your own solution.
If you familiarize yourself with these topics it will definitely give you an advantage at the summer course:
- Ubuntu Linux
- Python programming or C++ programming (not necessarily both, beginners should choose Python)
- FroboMind (read this PDF paper)
- Robot Operating System (ROS) (just to get an overview, FroboMind will help you with the rest)
- C programming for Atmel AVR microcontroller. Look at RoboCard which will be available at the course.
- Serial (RS232) communication
Theoretical
- Proximity sensors ultrasound, Laser Range Scanners (Lidar)
- Gyros, accelerometers, compass
- Absolute and relative rotary encoders
- State machines
- Hough transform
- RANSAC
- Kalman filters (this is difficult)
- H-bridge motor controllers We typically use Simple-H
- PID controllers
- 2D rotation matrixes
