Abstract This paper presents the RobonAUT contest organized by the Budapest University of Technology and Economics, Department of Automation and Applied Informatics. The contest aims to support the education of control theory, embedded system design and several other courses related to building autonomous mobile robots in a fun and instructive teamwork project. Students are required to build autonomous four-wheel robots capable to go along a path indicated by a continuous line on the ground, and to perform several tasks along the way. These tasks involve obstacle avoidance, parking operations, passing slopes, and acceleration segments. 3 students work together in a team during the semester to build their robot, for which they need skills related to control theory, both analog and digital circuit design, and microcontroller programming. The task has a very strong integrating nature by utilizing the material of several courses of electrical engineering. Beside the motivating fact that building an own robot is fun, we believe that students are given the opportunity to apply their knowledge to solve a real-world engineering task. And based on the popularity of the challenge, students seem to realize the need for this practice as well. This paper is aimed to describe the history, rules and experiences of the challenges in 2010 and 2011, together with the plans of the 2012 challenge.