Abstract:

The presence of robotics in education is constantly growing. Nowadays, there are careers fully dedicated to the study of this branch of engineering. In addition, interest in this area of technology is becoming frequent at lower levels of education, such as schools and high schools. However, the knowledge or the means to put robotics skills into practice may lack at these levels. Furthermore, evidence from previous work indicates that the concepts are understood and assimilated better when the explanations are more visual. For this reason, in this work an application with a user-friendly graphical interface is developed. This application is useful for testing the performance of different computer vision techniques, in real time and in the desired environment using the integrated camera of the system. In this way, the robotics practices or workshops on these topics become more interactive. Also, to increase interaction and attention from the students, it is proposed, whenever possible, to use it from the point of view of a real robot. This robot can be teleoperated in a very simple way from the application. For this purpose, a graphical application is created with the CVUI library in Python. This interface allows to visualize the display of the controls for tele-operation and the outputs of different computer vision techniques. Moreover, it is useful for choosing between the different computer vision techniques to visualize on the display. This graphical interface has a very intuitive design so that it can be manipulated by anyone, even without programming skills. This application is integrated into ROS to perform the communication with the robot necessary for its teleoperation. To make this tool more accessible, it is developed on the Turtlebot robot platform, which is a cost-effective option. In this way, it can be used at almost any educational level and is perfectly capable of performing such tasks.

In conclusion, this work aims to be a tool to achieve more interactive robotics practices or workshops. The main objective is to provide a more visual experience when teaching concepts such as computer vision techniques integrated into robotic applications, without being financially or complexly constrained.

Keywords:

Graphical interface, computer vision techniques, educational robotics, teaching.