Autonomous Robot Design Competition (6.270)
MIT's hands-on robotics course in which students design, build, and debug an autonomous robot to compete in a January tournament. Once a match starts, no human intervention is allowed, so the robot must navigate the playing field, recognize opponents, and manipulate game objects entirely on its own. The course provides hardware kits, software tools, and technical documentation, drawing on concepts from MIT classes such as 6.001, 6.002, 6.004, and 2.007, though none are formal prerequisites. Unlike the remote-controlled machines built in Design and Manufacturing I (2.007), 6.270 robots run fully autonomous code. Materials include lecture notes, kit specifications, and competition rules, released through MIT OpenCourseWare under a Creative Commons license. The course culminates in a live head-to-head competition where teams' designs are tested against each other on a shared game board.