IEEE RAS-Funded Project CEMRACreation of Educational Material in Robotics

and Automation

SyRoTek - System for robotic e-learning

Miroslav Kulich, Karel Kosnar, Gael Ecorchard, Jan Chudoba

Intelligent and Mobile Robotics GroupThe Czech Institute of Informatics, Robotics and Cybernetics

Czech Technical University in Prague

The Goal

is to extend the existing robotic e-learning platform SyRoTekdeveloped at Czech Technical University in order to

I attract educational and research institutions from robotics andrelated areas to use the system for their education andresearch and to perform experiments with a real hardware.

I make SyRoTek freely available to a huge community of usersby allowing them to learn the system independently and thenwork with it without need of interaction with a teacher or anadministrator.

The approach – what should be doneWhile technical quality of the system is well advanced, teachingmaterial needs to be created/extended in order to attract a widecommunity of new users.

I On-line course materialI a fully standalone on-line course within the current SyRoTek webI theory (control → high-level planning), sample codes and apps, quizzesI running and testing own code on real robotsI independent study without teacher assistance (see MIT

OpenCourseWare, CMU Open Learning Initiative + real HW)

I Interactive introduction to SyRoTekI integrated into SyRoTek webI allowing to familiarize with the system in an entertaining wayI a sandbox to try out practically newly learned skills

I Interactive demo applicationsI sample codes with a web interfaceI a user will be able to run/pause the codes and to change

key parameters of the algorithms from the SyRoTek web pageI theoretical introduction to each application

Current status – what has been done

I On-line course material

I Visualization of Dijkstra algorithmI Commented code templates in C++ for fundamental

algorithms (planning, mapping, reasoning, . . . )I An exemplary C++ application for the exploration task

I Interactive introduction to SyRoTek

I Initial versions of Introduction to ROS in C++ andIntroduction to SyRoTek courses

I Interactive demo applications

I Code in Python for Braitenberg vehicle, wall following, PIDcontroller, and trajectory following

I Connection and communication of the web page with SyRoTekI Design of web interface to the demo applications

Near-future work – what we are working on

I Introduction to ROS in Python and Introduction toPlayer/Stage courses

I Visualization of other algorithms (Bresenham, Minkowski sum)

I Finalization and proof-reading of the courses

I Finalization of the framework for demo applications

I Testing of the code with real robots

I Creation of videos from experiments

I Automatic reservation for demo tasks

I Improvements of the used web framework and adding newfeatures to it

I Integration of all the components onto the SyRoTek web

No funds have been consumed till now.