A Model Based Design Approach To System Building Using The e-Yantra Educational Robot

The e-Yantra robot is the basis for a highly scalable embedded systems teaching program setting up 500 embedded systems labs in Indian engineering colleges. A key strategy to encourage rapid prototyping of applications has been to encourage reuse of code using a commodity robot with a standard API along with excellent documentation and training material. An important challenge has been to teach the reasoning process from a design through to an implementation deployed on an actual machine. Model based design is key to articulating such reasoning. A further challenge is to do this in an affordable manner where most available model-based IDEs are expensive proprietary systems using languages such as Esterel and SCADE. We illustrate with a "Valet Parking" application how our robotic eco-system facilitates the learning of important model-based design principles taking a high-level specification of a problem down to working code and even deriving test cases in the process. A novel feature of our approach is that we carry out design-time scheduling of various (concurrent) activities by analyzing dependencies between modules and obtain purely sequential C-code implemented on a microcontroller without the need for an RTOS. This case study is an exemplar of a model-based design approach for a large class of such robotic projects.