Abstract:

The Robotics program at our institution has had growing enrollment over the past four years. This undergraduate program has an equal focus on theory and practice, with students doing hands-on work in our Robotics Lab. Last year we, like many others, faced the challenge of continuing teaching Robotics to newly remote learners. This paper reports on our response to this challenge, which was to embark on a project to create a robust, scalable, student-friendly and cost-effective virtual robotics lab. We describe a series of assumptions that we had and how each one proved out, conclude with our recommended architecture which (perhaps surprisingly) does not use any of the many existing cloud services. Instead it relies on a cluster of inexpensive “game” servers.

We find that this approach supports all our requirements, which were:
a) to provide a uniform experience for students on any operating system;
b) to mimic as much as possible the student experience in the physical lab.
c) to be able to supervise and assist students while they were using the lab; and
d) to support the growing number of students and
e) to be cost-effective.

Our recommended system meets and exceeds all of these requirements in the following way: Each student is provided with a private virtual environment which has the required operating system, packages, scripts pre-installed. These environments, managed by Kubernetes, can easily be created and recreated if needed. The student can access the virtual desktop, simulation environment and programming environment with a standard web browser on any platform. Provisioning new students, new software, homework assignments is semi-automated and scales well. In one semester of intensive use we have had high reliability, low cost and very high student satisfaction.

Keywords:

Robotics, education, engineering, computer science.