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ITCS Erasmo da Rotterdam: Robotics

Powerful high school teaching tool can evolve and reinvent itself to meet student needs.

Building a robot can provide a powerful motivation for students to overcome intellectual challenges and achieve levels of excellence in scientific and technical subjects. At a high school in Italy, ITCS Erasmo da Rotterdam, some students built an entry for a robot competition. The group participated in the category “rescue robot”—that is, a machine able to identify victims within a re-created disaster scenario.

The students first built a robot in 2011 based on a Xilinx Spartan®-3E device, using the Digilent Nexys2 educational board. They next ported this version—and competed in the next RoboCup Junior Italy in April 2012—to a Spartan-6 FPGA. The 2013 version is scheduled to run on a Zynq™-7000 All Programmable SoC.

The fundamental characteristics of our FPGA-based design, if compared with the normally diffuse platforms based on different kinds of microcomputers, are openness, flexibility, capability to evolve and reusability… Working within this paradigm, we were able to design a rescue robot that evolved, year after year, from the first prototype to the current version… The flexibility of the FPGA allowed a complete remodeling of the robot’s architecture, following the progression of the students’ knowledge, while leaving its basic physical structure substantially unaltered and maintaining the same design infrastructure. 

- Giulio Vitale, Professor and FPGA Design Consultant, ITCS Erasmo da Rotterdam, Bollate, Italy

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