Robotics education in the university* Rafael M Inigo and Jose M Angulo School of Engineering and Applied Science, University of Virginia, Charlottesville, Virginia 22901, USAD de Informatica, Universidad de Deusto, Bilbao, Spain Available online 28 October The importance of automation and robotics in modern factories has required the introduction of courses on these subjects at the graduate and undergraduate levels in engineering A comprehensive course on robotics must include the following subjects of fundamental importance: kinematics, dynamics, computer hardware and software, automatic control and machine This paper describes the authors' experience in teaching a graduate robotics course at the University of Virginia and a short summer course at the Universidad de Deusto in S Hands-on experience is a must in courses on robotics, and some simple yet effective systems designed and constructed by students are These include a program for transformation matrix manipulation, an operating system for manipulator control, and a simple three degrees of freedom programmable The majority of the students who took both courses were electrical engineers, but mechanical engineers and computer scientists were also Author Keywords: Robotics Education; Robotics Laboratory; Hardware; Software Development For Robotics Education *Parts of this paper were presented at the Second annual workshop on interactive computing, CAD/CAM: Electrical Engineering Education Washington,