IO2: Virtual Robo Lab

Start Date

2021-04-01

End Date

2021-09-30

The purpose of the Virtual Robo Lab is to give the students (after finishing the tasks related to building and programming the educational mobile robot) the opportunity to get a top-level understanding and some hands-on experience in more advanced robotics topics. The main topics covered will be: Simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM) and Autonomous navigation. The Virtual Robo Lab will make this possible without the need of expensive equipment (advanced mobile robot, laser scanners, and RGB-D cameras and so on).

The Virtual Robo lab will provide a simulated environment, where the users can experience mobile robot tele-control, mapping and autonomous navigation tasks, using the Robot operating System (ROS) environment and Gazebo simulator. Multiple publicly available open-source simulated robots and simulated worlds will be provided. We will develop the necessary source code and launch files for the simulations.

Users will be able to:

  • Tele-Control of Mobile Robot – Control of a simulated mobile robot via keyboard and/or joystick.
  • SLAM Map Building by tele controlling the simulated robot in the simulated environment.
  • Control the simulated robot to perform Autonomous Navigation of a Known Map to a user selected point on the map

The Virtual Robo Lab will bridge the hardware gap – universities, schools, NGOs, parents and pupils will have access to a robots in a simulated environment. It will shift the focus from the robot as a hardware equipment to its features and behavior. The aim is to provide equal access to the educational content to all students.

Activity 1:

Development of a script which will automatically install all required software and components (ROS, Gazebo, our software, etc.) on a fresh Ubuntu 16.04 Installation or alternatively, it will be provided VMware virtual machine with all the requires software preinstalled.

Activity 2:

Creation of a publicly accessible GitHub.com account, with repositories containing our simulation related software and the Arduino based educational mobile robot source code.

Activity 3:

  • Creation of tutorials and documentation;
  • Creation of a tutorial for the teachers on how to install software and run the simulations;
  • Creation of lessons for the students, for each of the different tasks;
  • Translation of English created tutorials and lessons in Slovak, Romanian and Bulgarian.
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