Education through Robotics at the United States Air Force Academy

This paper discusses the use of robotics in the electrical and computer engineering curricula at the United States Air Force Academy. One of our important educational goals is to endow graduates with engineering fundamentals and the important hardware and software engineering skills associated with designing, programming, constructing, debugging, and testing complex systems. To support this goal, we embed multiple opportunities into the curricula for students to learn and practice the requisite skills, gradually increasing the complexity as students advance. Collectively, robotics is incorporated into our curricula at two levels. At the fundamentals level, we use robots to teach basic concepts such as digital logic, analog-to-digital conversion, digital-to-analog conversion, programming, and power management. These concepts then form the basis for the development of more advanced skills such as microcontroller interfacing and control, and circuit design. At the more advanced level, robotics provides students with opportunities to work on sophisticated systems. System design provides valuable experience in partitioning difficult design problems from both the hardware and software perspectives, and facilitates the development of effective teamwork skills. The two-level approach has shown to be effective in meeting our educational goals.