Abstract:

Learning robotics aims to develop skill on student through more didactic processes at any level of education, software development for robotics platforms is a process that might be very complex. It relies on different working environments that needs an extend knowledge of their structures that might become a huge obstacle for students and non-expert user that want to be initiated on this field.

Robotics System Toolbox provides the integration between MATLAB and ROS. The former, it is an important tool for solving engineering and scientific problem that uses a matrix-based language. It is an environment for code development, data analysis, visualization and numerical computation. And the latter, it is one of the most used environments in recent years. ROS (Robot Operation System) offers a wide variety of tools and libraries for software development for robotics platforms.

The integration of these two platforms through the toolbox allows to design, implement and monitor programs for mobiles robots in a friendlier way using Windows, one of the more extended operation system on education. It can be used for both real and simulated platforms and simplifies the task of writing code for autonomous robots. Using this toolbox students can acquire basic knowledge on robotics progressively and amicably on an active way and through real robotics platform.

The aim of this work to explore and test the different features that Robotics System Toolbox provides for real application with mobile robots. Different experiments were carry out to test the performance toolbox. Starting with simple task as teleoperating the robot and creating a map of the environment, to more complex algorithm as navigation that are part of autonomous programs for mobile robots.

The paper is organized as follows. First, the Introduction will show the importance of robotics on education and the present scenario. The main concepts about MATLAB and ROS, taking a considerable importance on its structure, will be reviewed. Then, different algorithms will be presented from the more basic to the ones that take part of autonomous robot programs. To conclude, the experimental results are detailed and, finally, the most important conclusions are summarized.

Keywords:

Innovation, technology, research projects, robotics, mobile robots.