“Ruzzle” Arm: a Low Cost Educational Application in Real-Time Control course

This paper describes a project-based learning demonstrator developed for a Real-Time Control course addressed to CS and EE students. The goal of this project is to immerse the students in a realistic design environment, where they can strengthen the theoretical principles while improving their abilities to think, analyse, and solve problems learning-by-doing. The student-developed educational application, consisting of a robotic arm which plays the online Ruzzle game in a fully automatic way, has been realized in a short time with limited budget. This was a practical combination of knowledges from robotics, image acquisition and processing, tree search algorithms, systems integration and hardware configuration. The educational results of this experience have shown that the development of a practical-learning case based on the combination of different fields increased the student motivation and improved the assimilation of the theoretical concepts.