Motivation

• "The design and implementation of autonomous robots provides experience with hard problems in AI, experience that traditional classroom lectures and programming assignments cannot match." [11]

• The implementation of robots addresses an important criticism of AI: scalability. The students quickly recognize that the real world is much more complex than a simulated one.

• The process of building robots fosters a close interaction between theory and practice. The theory can lead to new intelligent control methods. The practice develops the intuitions needed to critically analyze the theory.

• The study of robotics provides a link to some central issues of computer science: hardware and software interation, software to solve real-world problems, space complexity (in terms of the controller's memory limitations), and time complexity (in terms of the speed of the robot's action decisions).

• Students are excited and eager to learn in order to improve their robot inventions.

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