Programming the Future: Autonomous Navigation in Robots

While I’ve taught classes on VEX robotics, the curriculum so far has focused on making a robot that can drive and lift. Although these tasks are foundational, I hope to give my students authentic robotics experiences that connect to the problems roboticists are solving. I plan to expand my robotics class so students write programs that make their robots more intelligent and autonomous, navigating through environments and automating their decision making for object retrieval. The ILIAD lab at Stanford researches robot behavior and intelligence, identifying algorithms and reward functions that optimize desired behaviors. As students learn to program their own robot, they will compare autonomous programs that are hard-coded and respond to human input in pre-approved sequences, triggered based on their desired inputs. For this lesson within our navigation unit, students consider the benefits and drawbacks of the coming autonomous car revolution and complete the first technical challenge,, constructing a basic program that uses sensors to navigate the robot to and from a point within a room. This unit continues to have students create a final program navigates a robot and moves items to different locations within a room, culminating in an evaluation of how well this type of system solves a major problem in robotics