Educational platform for learning programming via controlling mobile robots

Abstract

The paper proposes a mobile robot platform that uses Robot Operating System as a core and aims at improving the educational experience of computer science courses. In comparison to other education robotics projects, the advantage of our platform is a bundle of smart engineering solutions that allow simulating sensors using a single camera. The field of camera's view covers the whole platform and the captured video is processed with the proposed computer vision algorithm. Thus such educational tasks as line follower, maze exit finder, vacuum cleaner or game of tag are easily implementable. Moreover, the robots are accessed via the network that allows students to program and test their algorithms from various locations making this platform suitable for online classes.