Usage of Marine Robotics in Undergraduate Education at Universities of Applied Sciences
In the undergraduate education in engineering study programmes, the teaching of practical skills is of uttermost importance to qualify the students for their later professional activities. This includes praxis-oriented thinking, troubleshooting, and frustration tolerance while solving technical problems. However, in classic university programmes, the education especially in the first semesters typically consist of lectures, exercises and lab practises, in which the latter typically is based on resolving already known problems. Often, the students do not get in contact with the specific engineering work progress until late in their studies, for instance in the frame of a project thesis or the final bachelor thesis At our Department of Electrical Engineering and Information Technology at the Technische Hochschule Mittelhessen – University of Applied Sciences (THM), we believe that it is reasonable to put emphasis on the mentioned practical skills right from the beginning of the study. Therefore, our curriculum contains a specific module “Study Entry Seminar” in the first two semesters, where in the second semester the students have to solve individual engineering problems in small groups. Regularly, we use topics from the area of marine robotics as concrete tasks. We believe that the specific challenges of the marine environment are very well suited to teach the students important lessons in engineering work and to solve problems “as sophisticated as necessary, as simply as possible”. In our lecture, we will give a detailed insight in the procedure of mentioned seminar and present the marine surface robot “Axios” which was developed at our department and is used as platform for the mentioned training.