Laboratory tools for robotics and automation education

Abstract

Abslmcf-This paper describes our efforts and plans to develop a Virtual Laboratory for the education in Rohotics and Automation. These efforts are characterized by the need of blending R&A subjects into a traditional Computer Science curriculum, thus forcing a specific selection of development topics. In this context, the Robotics Laboratory must provide basic as well as advanced experiments, to address the needs of students at different education levels. In this paper, we present the development of three main applications, to support Control Systems and Robotics classes, as well as thesis and dissertation research. Of particular interest is the effort in the area of teleoperation, preliminary to the opening, next year, of a new curriculum on Medical Informatics, in which Computer Assisted Surgery will play an important role.

Implementation of a novel industrial robotics course and its evaluation by students

“…Furthermore, in order to disseminate robotics education, some Internet based remote laboratories for teaching robotics have been implemented [14,17,9,6], and several institutions have made available through the internet sites were the user can interact with real robots, either with educational purposes or just for fun [24]. Besides using the internet to disseminate teaching and education, without the inherent costs of hardware, another possibility is the use of simulation applications [14,8,22]. Simulation is a powerful tool playing an important role in different areas of research, development, and education.…”

An industrial robotics course based on a graphical simulation package

“…In order to disseminate robotics education, some Internet based remote laboratories have been implemented for teaching robotics, such as the UJI Tele-Lab [11], the Virtual Laboratory for the education in Robotics and Automation at the Universitá di Verona [12], the Tele-robotics system in the BILTIR CAD/CAM Robotics Center of the Middle East Technical University [13], the TIGER -Telepresence Instant Groupware for Higher Education in Robotics project [14], the Automatic Control Telelab of the Universitá di Siena [15], the Open laboratory of the Department of Automatic Control and Computer Engineering at the Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya [16], and the GigaBOT Web Lab for mobile robotics education [17]. Finally, several institutions made available through the internet sites were the user can interact with real robots, either with educational purposes or just for fun [18,19].…”

The on-Line Teaching of Robot Visual Servoing

“…Consequently, recent years have seen a huge emergence of tele-robotics and virtual laboratories with which to support a great variety of control theory, robot programming, tele-operation and trajectory planning disciplines. [1][2][3][4] Visual servoing techniques use the information provided by one or several cameras to control a robot's movement. Although the first systems of this type date back to the end of the 1970s and beginning of the 1980s, a true increase in publications dealing with this theme did not take place until the middle of the 1990s, and was owing to the availability of computational power of vision systems.…”