Abstract
The field of robotics embraces the interconnection of a variety of disciplines not only in research but also in teaching. For students this interconnection of disciplines can provide a different quality of understanding of theory and practice since it allows breaching, recapitulating, and interlinking knowledge and skills that otherwise might be taught only separately in a variety of well-contained courses. This paper describes the approach and material of a successfully running robotics course at Maastricht University that provides students with the opportunity to study and develop locomotion control with central pattern generators on a custom-made, low-cost, versatile EDucational MOdular robotic platform called EDMO. For these studies, students follow the chain of research and development from neuroscience over mathematical modeling, control theory, programming embedded systems, to the experimentation with robotic hardware that is supported by approaches from optimization and machine learning for optimal control parameter identification. The course thus interconnects a variety of disciplines and provides students with insights for instance into locomotion control and learning and provides a vivid view on aspects of numerical mathematics and calculus. We share teaching material and hardware design files for this course that is highly appreciated by our students in the hope that other teachers and students can benefit.
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Acknowledgment
The lecturer of this course, Dr. Rico Möckel, would like to express his gratitude to his former mentors Prof. Auke Ijspeert from the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL), Switzerland, and Prof. André Seyfarth from the Technische Universität Darmstadt (TU Darmstadt), Germany, for their commitment and support when sharing their teaching philosophies and experience with the author during his Postdocs under their supervision.
We thank the many students who participated in this course and who made this course very enjoyable with their enthusiasm, commitment, and creativity.
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Möckel, R., Dahl, L., Christopher, S.M. (2020). Interdisciplinary Teaching with the Versatile Low-Cost Modular Robotic Platform EDMO. In: Moro, M., Alimisis, D., Iocchi, L. (eds) Educational Robotics in the Context of the Maker Movement. Edurobotics 2018. Advances in Intelligent Systems and Computing, vol 946. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-18141-3_11
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-18141-3_11
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