Rusty Flying Robots: Learning a Full Robotics Stack with Real-Time Operation on an STM32 Microcontroller in a 9 ECTS MS Course
This addresses robotics education by providing a hands-on, real-time deployment approach, though it is incremental in applying existing methods to a new teaching context.
The paper tackles teaching robotics by having students implement and deploy nonlinear algorithms on a constrained STM32 microcontroller to make a robot fly, reporting positive student feedback over two years with ten students each.
We describe a novel masters-level projects class that teaches robotics along the traditional robotics pipeline (dynamics, state estimation, controls, planning). One key motivational part is that students have to directly apply the algorithms they learn on a highly constrained compute platform, effectively making a robot fly. We teach nonlinear algorithms as deployed in state-of-the-art flight stacks such as PX4. Didactically, we rely on two core concepts: 1) avoidance of provided black-box software infrastructure, and 2) usage of the safe and efficient programming language Rust that is used on the PC (for simulation) and an STM32 microcontroller (for robot deployment). We discuss our methodology and the student feedback over two years with ten students each. Teaching material: https://imrclab.github.io/teaching/flying-robots