BeagleMiP

Above: The self-balancing BeagleMiP robot is provided to students for robotics education based around the BeagleBone Black and Robotics Cape.

BeagleMiP is a Mobile Inverted Pendulum (MiP) that serves to introduce undergraduate students to programming robot control systems in an embedded Linux environment. Every year UCSD offers the undergraduate Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering (MAE) technical elective, MAE143c Digital Control Systems. Due to the mechanical simplicity and ease of construction of BeagleMiP, we are able to offer a hands-on curriculum in which every student builds and programs his or her own BeagleMiP. In addition to teaching digital feedback control systems, this course introduces students to the DroneLab’s software environment based around the BeagleBone Black and Robotics Cape.