Mobile Autonomous Systems Laboratory (MASLab)
MIT's MASLab, also listed as 6.186, is a hands-on robotics course run during the Independent Activities Period. Teams of three to four students get under a month to design, build, and program a fully autonomous robot that must navigate an unknown playing field using vision-based sensing, with no human control once the run begins. Course materials on MIT OpenCourseWare include lecture slides on mechanical design, electronics, and computer vision, sample code, hardware specifications for the robot kit, and rules for the final contest where robots complete a series of exploration and manipulation tasks. Students earn pass/fail credit and engineering design points rather than a letter grade. The course emphasizes practical systems integration over theory, covering motor control, sensor fusion, and real-time planning under real hardware constraints. It is aimed at students who already have some background in circuits and programming.