Robo A Roboheist Challenge

Teaching the Next Generation of Embedded Engineers

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Embedded security should be part of every engineer's toolkit. While teaching a design course to undergraduate students, Colin introduced a few aspects of embedded security and wanted to give you an overview of this, as it might spark some ideas readers could reuse.

This article normally discusses embedded security, sometimes and that overlaps with my academic teaching at Dalhousie University. In this article I'm going to take a major detour to showcase some of the work from students in my undergraduate electrical and computer engineering class. Along the way I want to provide useful resources, in case you find yourself teaching a variety of topics, especially around design, security, and "thinking like a hacker."

I've released everything I was able to for this course under open-source licenses, with the goal of providing material for others who might find this sort of reference useful.

PETER GREGSON'S LEGACY

For many years, Dr. Peter Gregson taught a special course in third-year electrical and computer engineering at Dalhousie University. In that course, students were challenged to build autonomous robots to solve a specific objective, which changed almost every year. After Dr. Gregson passed, the course continued his legacy, and each year students under the supervision of another professor compete in the Dr. Peter Gregson Robotics Challenge.

In recent years, Dr. Vincent Sieben has taught this course and designed his own robotics platform called the DALibot (Currently there is not a website for Dr. Vincent Sieben's DALibot and it is unreleated to other DALibots out there). This platform includes a mini-PC, motors, LIDAR, and IMU. It uses the Robotics Operating System 2 (ROS2) language, which allows complex pathfinding and other designs.