Abstract:

Over the last few years, robotic platforms have been used to improve the teaching experience in several subjects, [1] which is why the use of low-cost platforms has become widespread [2].

In previous works, an educational platform based on Matlab/Simulink/Lego EV3 [3] has been developed that allows interacting in real time with the robot. However, this platform is limited to the capacity of Simulink to adapt to different robotic devices, limiting its use to LEGO and Arduino or Rasberry Pi robots.

In this paper we present a generalization of this platform to any type of robot, based on Matlab/ROS/Robot.
Matlab is a mathematical software tool that offers an integrated development environment with its own programming language. This software is widely used in universities and research and development centers.

Robot Operating System (ROS) is a robotic middleware, that is, a collection of frameworks for software development of robots [4]. Despite not being an operating system, ROS provides standard services such as hardware abstraction, control of low-level devices, etc.

Besides, ROS is free software under BSD license terms and has been established as the standard OS for robots, widely used in educational Robotics, where most manufacturers offer libraries to work with their robots for free, [5,6].

MATLAB® support for ROS is a library of functions that allows you to exchange data with ROS-enabled physical robots, in this way we can generalize the platform to any type of robot that can be integrated with ROS [6,7].

References:
[1] N. Ozuron, H. Bicen. Does the Inclusion of Robots Affect Engineering Students Achievement in Computer Programming Courses?. Journal of Mathematics, Science and Technology Education, pp. 4779-4787, 2017.
[2] Irigoyen, E., Larzabal, E. & Priego, R. (2013). Low-cost platforms used in Control Education: An educational case Study. 10th IFAC Symposium Advances in Control Education, 256-261.
[3] Montés, N., Rosillo, N., Hilario, L. & Mora, M. (2018). A novel educatinal platform based on Matlab/Simulink/LEGO EV3 for teaching with robots. 12th International Technology, Education and Development Conference. Valencia.
[4] 4. M. Quigley, B. Gerkey, K. Conley, J. Faust, T. Foote, J. Leibs, E. Berger, R. Wheeler, and A. Y. Ng, "ROS: an open-source Robot Operating System," in Proc. Open-Source Software workshop of the International Conference on Robotics and Automation, Kobe, Japan, May, 2009.
[5] Araujo, A., Portugal, D., Couceiro, M. S., & Rocha, R. P. (2013, April). Integrating Arduino-based educational mobile robots in ROS. In Autonomous Robot Systems (Robotica), 2013 13th International Conference on (pp. 1-6). IEEE.
[6] N.M. Fonseca Ferreira, André Araújo, M.S. Couceiro, David Portugal, “Intensive Summer Course In Robotics – RobotCcraft”, Applied Computing and Informatics, 2018. DOI: 10.1016/j.aci.2018.04.005
[7] old-Geoffroy, Y., Gardner, M. A., Gagné, C., Latulippe, M., & Giguere, P. (2013). ros4mat: A Matlab programming interface for remote operations of ROS-based robotic devices in an educational context. In Computer and Robot Vision (CRV), 2013 International Conference on (pp. 242-248). IEEE

Keywords:

Robots in education, low cost platforms, Matlab/ROS.