A low cost mobile robot for engineering education

Robotic competitions are becoming widely used on education. The use of products from the market makes building robots possible at a very low-cost awakening the engineering nature of students and researchers. In this paper we present a low cost mobile robot which uses a normal laptop to guide itself through a track. The low cost robot involves the use of one or more cameras to control the position of the robot's position relative to the environment. Motors are from battery operated screwdrivers and the interface with the lap-top is based on an USB card, recently made available from a data acquisition cards manufacturer. The goal for this work is to build a large set of these robots, lend them to the engineering students and make them participate in a local university contest. Moreover, along the years, the student integrates more and more knowledge in the robot allowing it to perform as better as their knowledge increases along the course.