ALBERT

Description: This paper presents an open-access platform for practical learning of intelligent robotics in engineering degrees: Robotics-Academy. It comprises a collection of exercises including recent service robot applications in real life, with different robots such as autonomous cars, drones or vacuum cleaners. It uses Robot Operating System (ROS) middleware, the de facto standard in robot programming, the 3D Gazebo simulator and the Python programming language. For each exercise, a software template has been developed, performing all the auxiliary tasks such as the graphical interface, connection to the sensors and actuators, timing of the code, etc. This also hosts the student’s code. Using this template, the student just focuses on the robot intelligence (for instance, perception and control algorithms) without wasting time on auxiliary details which have little educational value. The templates are coded as ROS nodes or as Jupyter Notebooks ready to use in the web browser. Reference solutions for illustrative purposes and automatic assessment tools for gamification have also been developed. An introductory course to intelligent robotics has been elaborated and its contents are available and ready to use at Robotics-Academy, including reactive behaviors, path planning, local/global navigation, and self-localization algorithms. Robotics-Academy provides a valuable complement to master classes in blended learning, massive online open courses (MOOCs) and online video courses, devoted to addressing theoretical content. This open educational tool connects that theory with practical robot applications and is suitable to be used in distance education. Robotics-Academy has been successfully used in several subjects on undergraduate and master’s degree engineering courses, in addition to a pre-university pilot course.

Description: A satellite spacecraft is generally composed of a central Control and Data Management Unit (CDMU) and several instruments, each one locally controlled by its Instrument Control Unit (ICU). Inside each ICU, the embedded boot software (BSW) is the very first piece of software executed after power-up or reset. The ICU BSW is a nonpatchable, stand-alone, real-time software package that initializes the ICU HW, performs self-tests, and waits for CDMU commands to maintain on-board memory and ultimately start a patchable application software (ASW), which is responsible for execution of the nominal tasks assigned to the ICU (control of the satellite instrument being the most important one). The BSW is a relatively small but critical software item, since an unexpected behaviour can cause or contribute to a system failure resulting in fatal consequences such as the satellite mission loss. The development of this kind of embedded software is special in many senses, primarily due to its criticality, real-time expected performance, and the constrained size of program and data memories. This paper presents the lessons learned in the development and HW/SW integration phases of a satellite ICU BSW designed for a European Space Agency mission.

Description: This article presents a full course for autonomous aerial robotics inside the RoboticsAcademy framework. This “drone programming” course is open-access and ready-to-use for any teacher/student to teach/learn drone programming with it for free. The students may program diverse drones on their computers without a physical presence in this course. Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV) applications are essentially practical, as their intelligence resides in the software part. Therefore, the proposed course emphasizes drone programming through practical learning. It comprises a collection of exercises resembling drone applications in real life, such as following a road, visual landing, and people search and rescue, including their corresponding background theory. The course has been successfully taught for five years to students from several university engineering degrees. Some exercises from the course have also been validated in three aerial robotics competitions, including an international one. RoboticsAcademy is also briefly presented in the paper. It is an open framework for distance robotics learning in engineering degrees. It has been designed as a practical complement to the typical online videos of massive open online courses (MOOCs). Its educational contents are built upon robot operating system (ROS) middleware (de facto standard in robot programming), the powerful 3D Gazebo simulator, and the widely used Python programming language. Additionally, RoboticsAcademy is a suitable tool for gamified learning and online robotics competitions, as it includes several competitive exercises and automatic assessment tools.