Teaching physical human-robot interaction to computer science undergraduate students

摘要

The introduction of the teaching of physical Human-Robot Interaction in a Bachelor curriculum of Computer Science is necessary to increase the students's awareness in novel challenging applications, ranging from industrial manipulators to medical robots. Computer Science students are usually taught theoretical disciplines with very few laboratory experiences, especially including real systems. In this paper we want to present a course for Bachelor students in Computer Science which is based on laboratory experiences and aims at making the students familiar with physical systems modeling and control, haptics and human-robot interaction. The course has been recently introduced at the University of Verona as a pilot experiment, with positive reactions from the students. We will describe the proposed method and its integration with the current curriculum in our University. The goals of the course are: the application of theoretical concepts from different disciplines to a real system (haptic paddle); the introduction of the human factor in such real system and its analysis; the improvement of the students ability to solve problems when facing real systems; the improvement of transversal knowledge, such as autonomously finding a solution using previous knowledge, performing scientific experiments, team work, collecting and reporting scientific results.