A Thousand Robots for Each Student: Using Cloud Robot Simulations to Teach Robotics
One of the main problems when teaching robotics is the lack of robots for all the students in the class due to its costs and difficulty to maintain. In this paper, we analyze the advantages and drawbacks of using simulations for teaching robotics instead
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Abstract One of the main problems when teaching robotics is the lack of robots for all the students in the class due to its costs and difficulty to maintain. In this paper, we analyze the advantages and drawbacks of using simulations for teaching robotics instead of real robots, as a solution to that problem. We describe a simulation tool based in the cloud that allows the simulation of complex robots off the shelf by using only a web browser as the base system for teaching robotics. Finally we provide the description of a teaching protocol for minimizing costs and troubles while maximizing students experience, which makes a combined use of simulations and real robots. Keywords Teaching robotics ⋅ Robot simulations ⋅ Web application
1 Introduction Robotics is a fashion subject, that is in an exponential growth all over the world. New companies about robotics are created every week and the forecast indicates that it is going to increase even more [1]. Hence, there is an increasing need of more prepared engineers in this subject. Teaching robotics requires to teach in the most optimal way in order to transfer a knowledge that advances quickly, and to engage students into it. Fortunately, at this moment in time, we have access to a large base of commercial robots, schematics of open source robots [2], and free software [3]. All of that makes learning robotics easier than ever. However, the own existence of such large number of robotics options, makes very difficult to teach it, because making the learning experience work for all the students of the class can be, first, very expensive, and second, very complex.
R. Tellez (✉) The Construct Sim, San Francisco, USA e-mail: [email protected] © Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2017 M. Merdan et al. (eds.), Robotics in Education, Advances in Intelligent Systems and Computing 457, DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-42975-5_14
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We identify the main problems of teaching robotics as the following: 1. Robots and components for robots are expensive. Hence it can be very expensive for the school to provide those robots or parts to each of the students. 2. Even if the school has access to the robots or parts, it takes a long time to correctly make work a given robotic setup. Robotics is a difficult subject, and requires the proper functioning of a large amount of different parts. If the student has to build all those parts and make them work it is going to take time. Furthermore, the number of problems exponentially increase with the number of students in the class. 3. Finally, setting up a robotics development environment requires a huge effort for the students. Teachers can design the best experiments with robotics ever, but making those run in the students own environments (or even in the environments the school provides) is very tricky. Students have access to different types of computers and operating systems. In the same line, schools have different computer configurations configurations, old computers, etc. Hence, even if the teacher achieves to make the e
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