Northwestern University's Behavior-Based Robotics course is a project-oriented course that exposes undergraduate and graduate students to programming research-grade robots for real-time autonomous activity. The course, which has been running for five years, combines lectures on theory with large amounts of concrete project work in which students are encouraged to creatively select their own goals and approaches. One of the course's most unusual aspects is that it uses low cost, state-of-the-art hardware that provides not only sonar and odometric sensing but also several real-time vision systems.