Open-Cube controllers and sensors were used in ROBOTs teaching in the winter semester 2024/2025 at the Czech Technical University in Prague, Faculty of Electrical Engineering. ROBOTs is a motivational course for students of the Cybernetics and Robotics study program (first semester). It turned out to be quite suitable for teaching. Massive use helped to find several firmware bugs. During the semester, a new firmware version was released (test subroutines for all possible sensors and motors and other improvements were added to the main menu).
Students were offered several tasks to solve – a classic line-follower was mandatory to get acquainted with PID control, they could also try a line follower with obstacle detection, a robotic sumo and a maze. There was also the opportunity to work on a task for a robotics competition organized at the faculty (robosoutez.fel.cvut.cz ), but this turned out to be too time-consuming for most students.
Several students continued to visit the lab, even though they got enough points for assessment quite early. They used the available time for more sophisticated robot programming. Bellow is a movie of such a robot. It starts in the middle of a maze and has to visit all available positions. The robot creates a map as it goes through it. It was able to complete the task, but not with 100% reliability – it sometimes got confused by sensor readings, there is still room for improvement… The robot used two motors and three LIDAR sensors to navigate the maze, and the third motor triggered a LEGO shooting device visible on the robot when the last position was reached 🙂
We would like to thank BTL Medical Development, which sponsored the production of the Open-Cube controllers and sensors.
