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Unibotics: open ROS-based online framework for practical learning of robotics in higher education

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Abstract

Robotics provides an increasing number of solutions for real-life problems, from autonomous driving to automatic cleaning, inspection and logistics. The demand of robotics education to train future engineers is also growing, both in regular degrees at universities and also in massive open online courses (MOOCs). Beyond theory lectures, robotics education typically requires hands-on and practiced robot programming to be effective and let the student develop the desired skills. This paper presents Unibotics, an open online learning platform that allows editing and running robot programs from the browser, and provides more than 20 academic units on service robotics, autonomous driving, drones, and mobile robotics. It uses state-of-the art open source robot simulator (Gazebo) and robot middleware (ROS), and so it is extensible with new exercises. It is intended as a tool for practical learning in robotics engineering university courses. The platform has been used by 130 students from four different university degrees. Furthermore, it has been experimentally validated at the Universidad Rey Juan Carlos (URJC) Master Degree in Computer Vision with 22 students.

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Data availability

The datasets generated during and/or analysed during the current study are available from the corresponding author on reasonable request.

Notes

  1. https://www.udemy.com/

  2. https://www.theconstructsim.com/

  3. https://riders.ai

  4. https://robotbenchmark.net

  5. https://www.argos-sim.info/

  6. https://new.abb.com/products/robotics/robotstudio

  7. https://robodk.com/

  8. https://www.ros.org/

  9. http://sirslab.dii.unisi.it/GraspingCourse/index.html

  10. https://peps.python.org/pep-0008/

  11. https://jderobot.github.io/RoboticsAcademy/exercises/

  12. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IAGZmqNrmio

  13. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aWkTDp2UobM

  14. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=obHhJ-_Y96c

  15. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y7rBPpV2NdI

  16. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fv9s99IEIvc

  17. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xUpTw0_jt5s

  18. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vn4ahq8mElg

  19. https://robots.ros.org/kobuki/

  20. http://jderobot.github.io/RoboticsAcademy/

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Acknowledgements

This research was partially funded by the Community of Madrid in the framework of the research project RoboCity2030-DIH-CM (2019-2022): RoboCity2030-Madrid Robotics Digital Innovation Hub, Programa de Actividades de I+D entre Grupos de investigación de la Comunidad de Madrid en Tecnologías 2018 project ref. S2018/NMT-4331. Authors appreciate the help of Google for improving RoboticsAcademy through the Google Summer of Code program since 2017.

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  1. David Roldán-Álvarez, José M. Cañas, David Valladares, Pedro Arias-Perez and Sakshay Mahna contributed equally to this work.

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Universidad Rey Juan Carlos, Madrid, Spain

    David Roldán-Álvarez, José M. Cañas & David Valladares

  2. Universidad Politécnica de Madrid, Madrid, Spain

    Pedro Arias-Perez

  3. JdeRobot Organization, Madrid, Spain

    Sakshay Mahna

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  1. David Roldán-Álvarez
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Correspondence to David Roldán-Álvarez.

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Roldán-Álvarez, D., Cañas, J.M., Valladares, D. et al. Unibotics: open ROS-based online framework for practical learning of robotics in higher education. Multimed Tools Appl (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11042-023-17514-z

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