On developing a mesh network of robots for hands-on undergraduate education

Abstract

Our goal is to introduce the latest technology based laboratory experiments to engage students effectively and to help them understand the fundamental concepts in the electronics and telecommunications fields. In order to achieve this goal a multi-featured or a multi-disciplinary platform is used to develop the experiments. The essence of our approach is twofold: to evaluate a platform which can be used to teach the basics of wireless networks, and later use the same platform to develop innovative control applications. This robotic platform can also be used for experimental research in mobile sensor networks. The platform we adopted is the surveyor robot (SRV-1) platform. In this paper, we propose laboratory experiments on TCP, UDP, different networking modes and mesh network of robots. Additionally, we report the results of an initial assessment to evaluate the students' knowledge level on wireless networks and their interest in using the surveyor robot platform.