  The worldline formalism has been widely used to compute physical quantities
in quantum field theory. However, applications of this formalism to quantum
fields in the presence of boundaries have been studied only recently. In this
article we show how to compute in the worldline approach the heat kernel
expansion for a scalar field with boundary conditions of Robin type. In order
to describe how this mechanism works, we compute the contributions due to the
boundary conditions to the coefficients A_1, A_{3/2} and A_2 of the heat kernel
expansion of a scalar field on the positive real line.
