Recent CSE alumnus Chris Barngrover (MS '10, PhD '14) developed a new CSE 190 course, Introduction to Robotics, which he first taught during the Winter 2015 quarter, juggling lectures to undergraduates with his full-time job in SPAWAR's Unmanned Systems group (where he works on computer vision for robotics). He also arranged to provide low-cost robotics kits to each team to integrate into a more complex system, including at least two peripherals. During the second half of the quarter, students broke into teams to work on robot projects that accounted for 50 percent of their final grades in the class.
This week Barngrover (at right) posted a video created by one of the CSE 190 teams involving "Autonomous Tracking and Following of Indoor RC Helicopter." Undergraduate students (below, l-r) Frank Bogart, Mike Lara, James Lee and Kenny Yokoyama completed the BLLY project (pronounced Billy, and derived from the first letters of the students' last names). Three of the students are computer engineering majors: fifth-year student Bogart worked on the vision for the robot; senior Lara handled the embedded systems; and Lee, a second-year transfer student, worked on the navigation and hardware. The fourth team member, Yokoyama, is a third-year computer science major who worked on the Linux setup and networking.
BLLY combined a do-it-yourself personal robot (based on the TurtleBot robotics kit) and open-source software with a Kinect and a netbook. Students also used Qualcomm DragonBoards to gain hands-on experience with Robot Operating System. The Kinect was used to detect the helicopter in 3D space using its RGB camera in conjunction with its depth-sensing capabilities. The students also implemented an LED array to display the relative position of the RC helicopter in the frame of the Kinect's camera in real time. The resulting autonomous robot follows around a tiny, remote-controlled quadcopter, and if the copter starts moving away, the robot accelerates in its direction to maintain an ideal distance between the two.
For the Spring 2015 quarter, Barngrover switched to teaching a course in the Master of Advanced Studies program in Wireless Embedded Systems of the Jacobs School, titled Introduction to Embedded Systems Design (WES 237A). The part-time MAS program is designed for working professionals, and it involves a full day of lectures and labs every other Friday.
Read the syllabus for CSE 190 Introduction to Robotics.
Read the syllabus for WES 237A.