Introducing modern robotics with ROS and Arduino

Abstract

Abstract—This paper describes our experience with intro-ducing modern robotics through Robot Operating System. ROSframework allows rapid robot prototyping and gives access tomany state-of-the-art robotic solutions. It is however, softwareoriented and requires its users to understand well softwaredevelopment ideas and methods. While teaching undergraduatestudents ROS, we came up with some solutions how to introduceit to people without deep computer science background. Thepaper presents our Mymodel robot application that simplifiesmodeling of the robots using URDF format and some Arduinobased programs. I. I NTRODUCTION The robotics curriculum must contain the laboratory stage.This is absolutely necessary to familiarize students with realrobots, their control systems and software. However, an in-teresting approach is to proceed this stage by modeling andsimulation. For several years we have been using two conve-nient applications to teach students how to model and simulaterobots and the whole robotic stands, namely: the combinationof Robotics Toolbox (for Matlab) with RoboWorks, and theEasyRob software [1]. These programs provide tools to buildgraphical models of robots, to manipulate them, and analyzekinematics and dynamics. Recently, much more powerfulsolution appeared that can support both simulation and realcontrol stages of robotics curriculum.ROS (Robot Operating System) is an unified and robustframework for robot modelling, control and visualisation [2].It is a more and more popular tool for rapid prototyping ofrobot software as it provides an easy way to integrate, test andreuse algorithms constructed by robotic community around theworld. And it is an open source, too. However, because of itscapabilities and scope, ROS has a fairly steep learning curve[3]. This problem is more distinct if the user has only littlecomputer science background, what is the case for the bachelorprogram in Automatics and Robotics at the Lodz University ofTechnology. We believe though, that the benefits of using ROSare vast and worth our work of finding skilful methods, easyto use tools and appropriate knowledge, to involve even less”computer science type” students to use this modern robotictool. In this paper we will describe methods and tools, thatworked best in our case. Arduino is the hardware platform wehave employed in this quest.II. M