The Robot Programming Network

RPN (Robotic Programming Network) is an initiative to bring existing remote robot laboratories to a new dimension, by adding the flexibility and power of writing ROS code in an Internet browser and running it in the remote robot with a single click. This project is possible thanks to IEEE Robotics and Automation Society.

Logo proyecto

Being built upon Robot Web Tools, RPN works out-of-the-box in any ROS-based robot or simulator. As we have employed LTI (Learning Tools Interoperability http://www.imsglobal.org/lti/), most of the modern learning system can connect to our tool.

We plan to integrate the tool in a Moodle environment, creating some programming courses and make it open to researchers and students. Online materials would include introductory course modules on mobile robots and humanoids, aimed to learn from basic concepts in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) to more advanced programming skills. The users would have access to the online server hosts, where they submit and run their programming code on the fly. The hosts would run a variety of robot simulation environments, and access to real robots can also be granted, upon successful achievement of the course modules.

This part of the project is active and students are completing courses right now. Test with one course (already open) are being made on other learning environments.

As part of the project is improving teaching impact, the latest gamification techniques are being tested: Badges, Skill tests and Challenges are given for checking the success, and  online competitions are scheduled for additional motivation and fun.

To maintain contact with the students and teachers community, it has its own facebook page in which the latter information about the project and the courses is available.

 

Start date: 
Wednesday, 1 January, 2014
Finish date: 
Wednesday, 31 December, 2014