Session 1

Mobile Robotics

Let the robot move with hands-on experiences

The course introduces students to mobile robotics which can be seen in many areas such as vacuum cleaning robot (iRobot Roomba), delivering foods at restaurants, moving packages at warehouses like Amazon fulfillment Center, self-driving mobile vehicles, and medical service robot to deliver materials to save lives or communicate doctors with peoples including patients, or even actively utilized in military. 

The mobile robotics consists of locomotion (propelling to move such as electric motors), perception (sensing technology), and so on where you will learn from basic electronics, electrical circuits to test sensors, and basic programming (C/C++) to control the robot propulsion to get goals such as line tracking, obstacle avoidance, object following, or vision sensing for obtaining goals used in many applications.

Curriculum

You will learn from constructing circuits to test sensors, and programming (C/C++, or python) to control the robot. The mobile robotics course is a hands-on experience while having fun that basically use:

  • A statically stable robot frame to learn robot mechanisms
  • DC-motors with encoder sensors to measure traveling distance
  • An Arduino (microcontroller)-based programming via a computer-based IDE (integrated development environment)
  • Hardware that instructs the robot to execute commands to move the robot autonomously
  • A breadboard for constructing circuits to learn electronics for robotic systems
mobile robots
Planned Topics

The course has multiple sections using different sensors for robots to

  • Navigate different terrains including flat floor to Mars-like terrain,
  • Track lines (black or white),
  • Detect obstacles and
  • Follow objects
  • Use camera vision and image processing technologies
  • Be controlled using remote IR controllers, joysticks or smartphones.

Each section requires some lab sessions to explore scientific, physics-based learning to see what is going on behind the scenes under robot movement.

 

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Dongbin Lee
Faculty Lead
Don Lee

Assistant Professor, ECPE (SOECS)

Ph.D., Clemson University, 2009

Dr. Dongbin "Don" Lee is an assistant professor in the ECPE Dept, SOECS at UOP and has expertise and interest in uncrewed robotic systems with control systems and AI/deep/machine learning techniques in application to self-driving autonomous vehicles, smart manufacturing, efficient solar-power systems, farmers-centered sustainable precision agriculture tech, vector control, EOD, drones, or ATVs. Dr. Lee is advising solar-powered racing car club and building student-centered projects at Pacific and has been advising student competition teams including robotics, and supporter of STEM/MESA outreach. In addition, he has been the recipient of several Oregon NASA space grants from 2017-2022.

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