Short informative title: Towards a new tendency in embedded systems in mechatronics for the engineering curricula

This paper presents a robot motion controller for an undergraduate laboratory study program. It is designed to help the students learn and to assess specific learning outcomes proposed by ABET by solving a real‐life problem. The main objective of this project is to enable the engineering students to learn some core concepts about embedded systems and motion controllers for robotics by applying them in practice. Also, the proposal shows how to introduce the students to a new tendency in the embedded system market, namely, an All Programmable System on a Chip (SoC). This methodology incorporates interdisciplinary knowledge, technical and professional skills required for pursuing a successful career. In the present study, we surveyed the observations and interests of students towards the learning process, and the results indicate that the inclusion of the robot prototype has a significant impact on providing students with new learning outcomes.

[1]  Tianmiao Wang,et al.  A mechatronics control engineering class at Beihang University, China: Practicing and exploring , 2012 .

[2]  Rolf Johansson,et al.  Integrated architecture for industrial robot programming and control , 1999, Robotics Auton. Syst..

[3]  Kevin C. Craig.  Is anything really new in mechatronics education? , 2001, IEEE Robotics Autom. Mag..

[4]  Joseph F. Engelberger.  Robotics in practice :: management and applications of industrial robots , 1980 .

[5]  Timothy N. Chang,et al.  Motion control firmware for high speed robotic systems , 2004, Proceedings of the IEEE International Conference on Mechatronics, 2004. ICM '04..

[6]  Brahim Bouzouia,et al.  A reconfigurable counter controller for digital motion control applications , 1997 .

[7]  Kenneth H. Rose.  A Guide to the Project Management Body of Knowledge (PMBOK® Guide)—Fifth Edition , 2013 .

[8]  Yong-Seon Moon,et al.  Hardware Implementation of Motor Controller Based on Zynq EPP(Extensible Processing Platform) , 2013 .

[9]  Issa M. S. Panahi,et al.  Digital signal processors for modern control systems , 1996 .

[10]  Philippe Dondon,et al.  Implementation of a feed-forward Artificial Neural Network in VHDL on FPGA , 2014, 12th Symposium on Neural Network Applications in Electrical Engineering (NEUREL).

[11]  Karel Jezernik,et al.  E-training in mechatronics using innovative remote laboratory , 2011, Math. Comput. Simul..

[12]  Xin Li,et al.  Low-power hardware implementation of movement decoding for brain computer interface with reduced-resolution discrete cosine transform , 2014, 2014 36th Annual International Conference of the IEEE Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society.

[13]  Ying-Yu Tzou,et al.  FPGA realization of space-vector PWM control IC for three-phase PWM inverters , 1997 .

[14]  Thomas C. Henderson,et al.  Concurrent design of a three-link manipulator prototype , 2001, Comput. Electr. Eng..

[15]  Mats Hanson,et al.  Mechatronics—the evolution of an academic discipline in engineering education , 2005 .

[16]  Bruno Siciliano,et al.  A closed-loop inverse kinematic scheme for on-line joint-based robot control , 1990, Robotica.

[17]  Marco Ceccarelli,et al.  Robotic teachers' assistants , 2003, IEEE Robotics Autom. Mag..

[18]  Jorge Angeles,et al.  Fundamentals of Robotic Mechanical Systems , 2008 .

[19]  Yan Han,et al.  Real-time traffic sign recognition based on Zynq FPGA and ARM SoCs , 2014, IEEE International Conference on Electro/Information Technology.

[20]  Mac Schwager,et al.  Distributed Coverage Control with Sensory Feedback for Networked Robots , 2006, Robotics: Science and Systems.

[21]  Eric Monmasson,et al.  FPGAs in Industrial Control Applications , 2011, IEEE Transactions on Industrial Informatics.

[22]  Steve Roach,et al.  Computer Science curricula 2013: getting involved and getting ready , 2013, SGCS.

[23]  Paolo Rocco,et al.  The structured design of an industrial robot controller , 1996 .

[24]  R. M. Parkin.  The mechatronics workbench , 2002 .

[25]  Kean C. Aw,et al.  A FPGA-based rapid prototyping approach for teaching of Mechatronics Engineering , 2007 .

[26]  Louise H. Crockett,et al.  The Zynq Book: Embedded Processing with the Arm Cortex-A9 on the Xilinx Zynq-7000 All Programmable Soc , 2014 .

[27]  Youngchul Bae,et al.  Implementation of motor controller using Zynq EPP , 2014, 2014 Joint 7th International Conference on Soft Computing and Intelligent Systems (SCIS) and 15th International Symposium on Advanced Intelligent Systems (ISIS).