Abstract
With its impressive rise in popularity within education at all levels, Robotics is a rapidly growing field merging science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM). Nevertheless, the lack of standards in educational robotics has led to several issues, namely little (or almost no) code reuse between educational robotics curriculum from different schools, large dependency on proprietary solutions, and endless paradigm shifting between text, visual and flow programming languages. This paper proposes a novel educational programming language architecture to teach students how to program robots. The architecture combines the Robot Operating System (ROS) quasi-standard with the Snap! visual programming language, targeting students from primary education to high school. As opposed to the limited alternatives available in ROS, the solution proposed does not require the acquisition of any robotic platform, running directly on the browser, and benefiting from the power of the internet to program ROS-enabled real and simulated robots.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Notes
- 1.
- 2.
- 3.
- 4.
- 5.
- 6.
- 7.
- 8.
- 9.
- 10.
- 11.
- 12.
- 13.
- 14.
- 15.
A demonstrative video can be seen at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T9cAixLaW-8.
References
Benitti, F.B.V.: Exploring the educational potential of robotics in schools: a systematic review. Comput. Educ. 58(3), 978–988 (2012)
Alimisis, D.: Educational robotics: open questions and new challenges. Themes Sci. Technol. Educ. 6(1), 63–71 (2013)
Kim, S.H., Jeon, J.W.: Programming Lego mindstorms NXT with visual programming. In IEEE International Conference on Control, Automation and Systems (2007)
Michieletto, S., Ghidoni, S., Pagello, E.: Why teach robotics using ROS? J. Autom. Mobile Robot. Int. Syst. 8(1), 60–68 (2014)
Quigley, M., Conley, K., Gerkey, B., Faust, J., et al.: ROS: an open-source robot operating system. In: ICRA Workshop on Open Source Software, vol. 3, no. 3.2, (2009)
Mavrotheris, E., Meletiou-Mavrotheris, M.: SMASH: an innovative training approach for parent education in mathematics and science. In: Proceedings of the 6th Hellenic Conference for Information and Communication Technologies in Education, pp. 349–356 (2008)
Joseph, L.: Mastering ROS for Robotics Programming. Packt Publishing, Birmingham (2015)
Noori, F.M., Portugal, D., Rocha, R.P., Couceiro, M.S.: On 3D simulators for multi-robot systems in ROS: MORSE or Gazebo?. In: Proceedings of the 15th IEEE International Symposium on Safety, Security, and Rescue Robotics (SSRR), Shanghai, China (2017)
Araújo, A., Portugal, D., Couceiro, M.S., Rocha, R.P.: Integrating arduino-based educational mobile robots in ROS. J. Int. Robot. Syst. 77(2), 281–298 (2015)
Couceiro, M.S., Figueiredo, C.M., Luz, J.M.A., Ferreira, N.M., Rocha, R.P.: A low-cost educational platform for swarm robotics. Int. J. Robots, Educ. Art 2(1), 1–15 (2012)
Kuipers, M.: Localization with the iRobot create. In: Proceedings of the 47th Annual Southeast Regional Conference, p. 33. ACM (2009)
Zaman, S., Slany, W., Steinbauer, G.: ROS-based mapping, localization and autonomous navigation using a pioneer 3-DX robot and their relevant issues. In: IEEE Saudi International Electronics, Communications and Photonics Conference, SIECPC 2011 (2011)
Crick, C., Jay, G., Osentoski, S., Pitzer, B., Jenkins, O.C.: Rosbridge: ROS for non-ROS users. In: Robotics Research, pp. 493–504. Springer, Heidelberg (2017)
Toris, R., Kammerl, J., Lu, D.V., et al.: Robot web tools: efficient messaging for cloud robotics. In: Proceedings of the 2015 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS), pp. 4530–4537. IEEE (2015)
Bellas, F., Naya, M., Varela, G., et al.: The Robobo project: bringing educational robotics closer to real-world applications. In: International Conference on Robotics and Education, RiE 2017, pp. 226–237. Springer (2017)
Zubrycki, I., Kolesiński, M., Granosik, G.: Graphical programming interface for enabling non-technical professionals to program robots and internet-of-things devices. In: International Work-Conference on Artificial Neural Networks, pp. 620–631. Springer (2017)
Yumi, N., Yuki, S., Tetsuya, O.: An effective visual programming tool for learning and using robotics middleware. Proceedings of the 2016 IEEE/SICE International Symposium on System Integration, Sapporo, Japan (2016)
Weintrop, D., Wilensky, U.: To block or not to block, that is the question: students’ perceptions of blocks-based programming. Proceedings of the 14th International Conference on Interaction Design and Children, Boston, Massachusetts, pp. 199–208 (2015)
Acknowledgement
We sincerely thank the community for the contributions on the free and open-source frameworks adopted in this work, particularly: robotcraft.ingeniarius.pt, ros.org, robotwebtools.org and snap.berkeley.edu.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2019 Springer Nature Switzerland AG
About this paper
Cite this paper
Tatarian, K., Pereira, S., Couceiro, M.S., Portugal, D. (2019). Tailoring a ROS Educational Programming Language Architecture. In: Lepuschitz, W., Merdan, M., Koppensteiner, G., Balogh, R., Obdržálek, D. (eds) Robotics in Education. RiE 2018. Advances in Intelligent Systems and Computing, vol 829. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-97085-1_22
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-97085-1_22
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-319-97084-4
Online ISBN: 978-3-319-97085-1
eBook Packages: Intelligent Technologies and RoboticsIntelligent Technologies and Robotics (R0)