A Robotics Environment for Software Engineering Courses

Abstract

The initial idea of using Lego Mindstorms Robots for student courses had soon to be expanded to a simulation environment as the user base in students grew larger and the need for parallel development and testing arose. An easy to use and easy to set up means of providing positioning data led to the creation of an indoor positioning system so that new users can adapt quickly and successfully, as sensors on the actual robots are difficult to configure and hard to interpret in an environmental context. A global positioning system shared among robots can make local sensors obsolete and still deliver more precise information than currently available sensors, also providing the base necessary for the robots to effectively work on shared tasks as a group. Further more, a simulator for robots programmed with Fujaba and Java which was developed along the way can be used by many developers simultaneously and lets them evaluate their code in a simple way, while close to real-world results.