USER’S ACCESS TO THE ROBOTIC E-LEARNING SYSTEM

SyRoTek

Miroslav Kulich, Karel Ko

snar, Jan Chudoba, Ond

rej Fi

ser and Libor P

reu

cil

Czech Technical University in Prague, Faculty of Electrical Engineering, Department of Cybernetics,

Prague, Czech Republic

Keywords:

e-Learning, Mobile Robotics.

Abstract:

SyRoTek is an e-learning platform for mobile robotics, artiﬁcial inteligence, control and other related domains

that provides access to mobile robots moving in the restricted area. The user is able not to only observe

a gathered data using internet interface, but also control the robots in real-time. Unlike majority of existing

e-learning robotic systems developed in the world in which the user can only tele-operate robots, behaviour

of the robots in the SyRoTek system can be modiﬁed, as the system allows to run own algorithms developed

by the user. The paper presents two interfaces providing access to the user: web pages and extension of

IDE NetBeans. Furthermore, two courses based on SyRoTek taught at two universities are described and

discussed.

1 INTRODUCTION

With a huge expansion of artiﬁcial intelligence and

mobile robotics technologies into many industrial ap-

plications as well as day-to-day activities it is nec-

essary to train students to understand and manage

these technologies. Already young children get fa-

miliarize with the world of science and technology in

kindergartens (Pek

arov

a, 2008) (St

ockelmayr et al.,

2011), where children (besides other activities) play

with robotic toys like Bee-bot or the animatronic pet

dinosaur Pleo. Older children at basic and secondary

schools are introduced to toy building bricks Lego

Mindstorms or Fischertechnik, which allow to design

and build own robot models and program and con-

trol these models making use graphical software (Al-

tin et al., 2010). Children thus understand main prin-

ciples of robotics and problems needed to be solved

to build an autonomous mobile robot. On the other

hand, poor sensor equipment and fragile construction

disqualify these tools for real-world problems and

long-term experiments. Universities teaching robotics

therefore use more powerful platforms like Videre Er-

ratic or Pioneer or build their own robots. The main

drawback of this approach is a price and a necessity

of a continuous maintenance. This is more important

when more than one robot is used.

The other stream focuses on building robotic lab-

oratories accessible via Internet. These laboratories

allow to share a robotic hardware among a large group

of users from different places. One of the ﬁrst robots

controlled at distance and available to public was Tel-

egarden (Telegarden, 2008). It has been running since

1995 with 9000 users registered to the system in the

ﬁrst month of operation. Bradford Robotic Telescope

(Telescope, 2008) is a part of an e-learning course of

which goal is to popularize astronomy. In addition to

open up a unique equipment to a broad public, the

many research programs use telescope for research

of galaxies, supernovas, and black holes. The sys-

tem thus combines a basic research with education by

sharing limited sources. The project RHINO (Rhino,

2008) combines tele-operation with visualization as it

offers a robotic guide in a museum. The robot Xavier

(Simmons et al., 2000) is an autonomous robot oper-

ating in indoor environments of university hallways.

The robot autonomy allows the users to enter high-

level tasks (e.g. go to a speciﬁed position), which

are performed by the robot autonomously. Robotoy

(Robotoy, 2008) - a robotic arm with a gripper - al-

lows the users to control it via a web interface. The

user can choose between two cameras from which it

can see robot’s working environment. The robot is

controlled in the command regime, i.e. the user enters

a command which is immediately fulﬁlled. One of the

most complex robotic e-learning laboratories was de-

veloped at Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in

Lausanne (EPFL). The RobOnWeb project (Siegwart

206

Kulich M., Košnar K., Chudoba J., Fišer O. and P

reu

cil L..

USER’S ACCESS TO THE ROBOTIC E-LEARNING SYSTEM - SyRoTek.

DOI: 10.5220/0003923202060211

In Proceedings of the 4th International Conference on Computer Supported Education (CSEDU-2012), pages 206-211

ISBN: 978-989-8565-06-8

 2012 SCITEPRESS (Science and Technology Publications, Lda.)

Figure 1: The Arena in the university computer lab (left) and robots operating in the Arena (right).

and Sauc, 1999) is focused on advanced robotic users.

The authors deﬁne ﬁve fundamental services of web

interface: chat, video, robot control, virtual robot rep-

resentation, and logging. Several conﬁgurations are

parts of the project varying mainly in the used robot

platforms and sensors: TeleRoboLab, AliceOnWeb,

Koala on the Web, and Pygmalion on the Web.

SyRoTek - a system for a robotic e-learning is sim-

ilar to the above mentioned systems as it also pro-

vides remote access to robotic actuators and sensory

data and a robot hardware has been integrated into e-

learning framework. The users are able to develop

own algorithms and monitor the behavior of these

algorithms on-line during real experiments. In this

paper we describe the system from user’s point of

view, i.e. user’s access to the system is described

by introduction of two main system interfaces: web

pages and NetBeans integrated development environ-

ment (IDE).

The rest of the paper is organized as follows. The

next section gives a short overview of the SyRoTek

system as a whole. The sections 3 and 4 describe web

interface to SyRoTek and SyRoTek plugins to Net-

Beans respectively. Courses taught with a support of

the SyRoTek system is shortly presented in the sec-

tion 5. Finally, remarks and future work are discussed

in the conclusion.

2 SyRoTek OVERVIEW

An overview of the SyRoTek realization is depicted in

Fig. 2 (see also (Kulich et al., 2009) for more details

see).

SyRoTek mobile robots move inside an enclosed

area (called Arena, see Fig. 1) consisting of neces-

sary supporting subsystems, e.g. thirteen charging

docks, lighting, visualization cameras, and localiza-

SyRoTek system

Visualisation Cameras

WiFi

Robots in the Arena

Localization

of Robots

Video Server

Main Control

Computer

User’s

Workstations

EMMI

Audio In

Audio Out

Video In1

Video In3

Video In2

Video Out

Figure 2: SyRoTek overview.

tion subsystem. The Arena (sized 3.5 × 3.8m) was

designed to be reconﬁgurable without need of human

attendance. This feature was achieved by installing

several moving obstacles, allowed to be retracted un-

der the surface. The presence of moving obstacles

allows to prepare more environment conﬁgurations in

the arena before a user starts solving his/her task, as

well to deﬁne tasks with dynamically changing envi-

ronment. Moreover, the arena workspace may be di-

vided into several mutually separated closed areas to

create robot working spaces for several users without

affecting each other.

The SyRoTek system contains thirteen S1R robots

developed especially for the system (Chudoba et al.,

2011). The robots are equipped with standard sensors

used in robotics (odometry, accelerometers, compass,

infra-red range sensors, sonars, and optionally with

a laser range-ﬁnder). The on-board computer with

Gumstix Overo Fire processor at 600 MHz provides

enough computational power for basic data process-

ing and communication with other components of the

system. Beside UART, SPI, I

C, and USB communi-

cation interfaces, the computer provides an on-board

802.11g wireless network module.

USER'SACCESSTOTHEROBOTICE-LEARNINGSYSTEM-SyRoTek

207

The core of the SyRoTek system is the Control

computer where main services of the system run and

which mediates robotic hardware to the user. These

services manage actual state of the robots, arena, pre-

pare robots according to the actual reservations, pro-

vide views to the Arena from cameras placed around

it, etc.

The Player/Stage framework (Gerkey et al., 2003)

has been selected as the main programming interface.

The Player is widely used in the robotic community

as it supports a wide variety of mobile robots and sen-

sors and contains huge library of state-of-the-art al-

gorithms for obstacle avoidance, planning, localiza-

tion, etc. The Stage is a simulator which can substi-

tute a real hardware with the same interface. The user

can therefore develop his/her code with the simulator

and the same code with no or few modiﬁcations can

be used for a real robot.

3 WEB INTERFACE

The web pages are the ﬁrst and most visible access

point to the SyRoTek system. They are designed to

attach the attention of the randomly coming visitors,

facilitate ﬁrst steps with the system to the users, and

help teachers to perform pedagogical tasks. At ﬁrst

glance visible part of the main page is the video show-

ing example of the system usage. Unacquainted vis-

itors can here ﬁnd what the SyRoTek system is and

how to use it. All the information about running

courses, manuals, registration and contact persons are

available even for non-registered users. On the other

hand, interesting parts of the system are accessible for

registered users only: they have access to the whole

e-learning part of the system and can work with the

robots.

All the users (both registered and non-registered)

can read all the materials of all courses, but non-

registered or non-enrolled users cannot access the

quizzes and solve the tasks. The course materials are

open for all to allow users take a informed decision if

the courses are interesting for them and want to regis-

ter into the SyRoTek system and enroll the courses.

The registration is the ﬁrst step into the SyRoTek

system. The registration form is accessible from the

web page. The user, who wants tho use the SyRoTek

system, provides the full name and afﬁliated organi-

zation, chooses the username and describes reasons,

why he or she wants to use the system. The process

of registration is not fully autonomous and every user

is individually assessed by a system administrator. If

the user is accepted, an e-mail is sent with the access

information. From this moment, it can enroll into the

offered courses. Some of the advanced courses can

be opened only for the users with a selected level of

knowledge. The level of new users is set to novice and

it is increased as the user completes courses at a given

level.

The reservation system is also accessible from the

web. The current occupation of the arena and robots

is visualized and registered user can reserve free time

slots for enrolled tasks. Every user can reserve the

robots and arena for a given total amount of time.

4 NETBEANS IDE INTEGRATION

Solution of the task often requires algorithm design

and development and its implementation in a certain

programming language. A substantial part of stu-

dent’s work with the SyRoTek system is therefore re-

lated to writing, compiling and debugging of source

codes.

There exists three interfaces of the SyRoTek: web,

command line, and NetBeans IDE. The web interface

is not suitable for development of the programs as

quality of the Internet connection can vary and con-

nection disturbances can easily cause lost of the sig-

niﬁcant part of student’s work. Furthermore, func-

tionality of editors on the web is very limited compar-

ing to nowadays IDEs. The command line interface

is well suitable for development of the programs and

many Unix users are familiar with it. The SyRoTek

system is fully equipped with tools for development

in a command line environment. But many students,

mainly beginners, appreciate the possibility to use an

integrated development environment.

IDE is an environment, in which all the develop-

ment is done and provides many features for author-

ing, modifying, compiling, deploying, version con-

trolling and debugging software. Therefore, we intro-

duce a set of plug-ins for NetBeans IDE, which allows

to develop programs for the SyRoTek system within

IDE. All the plug-ins integrate functionalities acces-

sible from different places of the system.

The usage of the IDE with SyRoTek plug-ins

brings the comfort of code completing, context help,

visual debugging as well as the access to all the

courses, tasks, reservation system and other compo-

nents of the SyRoTek system.

The ﬁrst step of the work in the NetBeans IDE

is to login into SyRoTek system. After that the IDE

is able to access all the data stored in the SyRoTek

system related to the current user. It is necessary to

mention that the active SyRoTek user account and In-

ternet connection is required for almost all plug-ins to

work. On the other hand, it is possible to work locally

CSEDU2012-4thInternationalConferenceonComputerSupportedEducation

208

Figure 3: The introductory web page http://syrotek.felk.cvu

t.cz.

(off-line) after few initial steps.

To start solving a given task, the NetBeans project

is necessary to create. A special type of the project

template - SyRoTek template - has been prepared and

included into the NetBeans. The student chooses the

course and task, which wants to solve, and all required

steps are made automatically.

The result of the task is required to be placed

in the version control system (Subversion) in stu-

dent’s repository in speciﬁed directory. The plug-in

checks out the related repository and includes all the

ﬁles (task related code skeletons) into the NetBeans

project. NetBeans IDE is then able to natively work

with the repository. As some of the tasks are designed

to be solved by a group of students, the group reposi-

tory allows to cooperate and share the code efﬁciently.

After the project is created, the student can work

locally without a need of the Internet connection. The

code can be tested in the simulator (Stage), which pro-

vides the same interfaces as a real hardware. This

testing brings the advantage of possibility to manipu-

late the robot and the environment as well as the pos-

sibility to change the simulation speed. Of course,

the student must keep in the mind, that the simula-

tor does not model all the possible sensor noise and

errors. When the student is satisﬁed with the perfor-

mance of his/her algorithm in the simulator, then it is

time to test the algorithm with real robots and sensors.

The reservation must be done to allow the student

an access to the robots in a given time. The plug-in

simpliﬁes the reservation process, chooses the course

and task according to the project which the student

is currently working on. Appropriate robots with re-

quired sensors are chosen according to the task. The

student just selects time and a required duration of the

reservation. The reservation interface is the same as

on the web, but it is accessible ”at one click” inside

IDE. The Internet connection is necessary for reser-

vation as well as for working with the real hardware.

Again, the SyRoTek plug-in provides the com-

fortable way of running student’s program as well as

the Player server from NetBeans IDE at one click.

The plug-in provides two possible ways, how to con-

nect student’s program with the robot hardware. The

ﬁrst possibility is to run student’s program locally on

his/her computer and to connect to the control com-

puter with the player server running. The second pos-

sibility is to run student’s program also on the control

computer in his/her user space. Outputs of student’s

program and the Player server are redirected into the

IDE and they are accessible as usual.

The plug-in provides also the visualization (see

Fig. 4) of the simulator or the real situation of the

SyRoTek Arena. The visualization can show not only

a video stream from cameras, but also sensors data,

recent positions of the robots or other user graphical

output. The student can dynamically change the cam-

era, sensors and other visualization parameters.

Figure 4: Visualization SyRoTek plug-in.

As soon as the student considers the task to be

solved, the resulting program should be submitted for

the evaluation. There is also a possibility to submit

the task for the test evaluation. The submission is

done through the version control system. The cur-

rent version of the program is tagged as ﬁnal and the

evaluation is done on this tagged version of the code.

At the ﬁrst, the plug-in for submission asks the

user whether the submission is ﬁnal or testing only.

After that, it takes the local copy of the source code,

USER'SACCESSTOTHEROBOTICE-LEARNINGSYSTEM-SyRoTek

209

checks whether all the ﬁles are under version control

and asks the user, what to do with those, which are

not. It performs commit and sets the tag of the version

according the requested type of submission ﬁnally.

The whole process of task solving from reading

the speciﬁcation, implementation, testing in simu-

lator and with real robots, to the ﬁnal submission

can be done within the NetBeans IDE. On the other

hand, a number of speciﬁc situations and advanta-

geous tasks exists, which cannot be covered and man-

aged in the IDE. We are expecting that as the users be-

come more and more advanced, they start to use the

command line tools to solve, if not the whole tasks,

these more complex issues.

5 LABS

The SyRoTek system has been used in courses taught

at Czech Technical University in Prague (CTU),

Czech Republic and University of Buenos Aires

(UBA), Argentina. The Introduction to Mobile

Robotics course help as a part of School of Informat-

ics at UBA in July 2011 was attended by 70 students

and teachers from Argentina and Uruguay with differ-

ent a-priory knowledge of robotics (from beginners

to postgraduate students studying robotics). Its aim

was to introduce main problems and solutions nec-

essary to control an autonomous mobile robot. Be-

sides eight lessons giving a theoretical overview of the

ﬁeld, the students solved a chosen practical exercise

(wall following, obstacle avoidance or wandering) in-

dependently in teams by two or three under teacher’s

supervision. During the whole course they used the

SyRoTek system: the started with registration and en-

rollment of the course. After that, they were requested

to ﬁll quizzes prepared by the teacher. Moreover, they

were able to download and read learning material and

SyRoTek manuals and documentation. The students

also used forum on SyRoTek pages for asking ques-

tions and reporting bugs in the system, albeit this fea-

ture was not introduced to the students.

The work in the lab was scheduled at the end of

the course. The students were split into two halves by

cca 40 people, each half having one 180 minutes time

slot for the experiments. The labs were performed

in the university computer laboratory, where client

software of the SyRoTek system (NetBeans with Sy-

RoTek plugins, and extended version of Player/Stage)

was installed in the form of virtual machine by the lab

administrator before the course. Student’s work con-

sisted from the following steps:

• Login to a computer and launching a virtual ma-

chine with the SyRoTek software.

• Launching NetBeans and logging into SyRoTek

system.

• Creation of a project from the template prepared

by the teacher.

• Development of the application in the simulator.

• Running of the application with a real robots.

Although majority of students had no previous ex-

perience with development of a robotic application

and some of them also a little programming experi-

ence, all the teams were able to control the robot in

simulator in dedicated time. Of course, some appli-

cations were not perfect as the controlled robots were

crashing to obstacles. Three of the teams tuned their

applications so that they run real robots in Prague at

distant. To attract the students, the teacher projected

a live video showing an actual situation in the Arena

on the wall, so the students were able to see behavior

of the robots.

The ﬁnal task for the students was to ﬁll the ques-

tionnaire about their satisfaction with the system and

suggestions for its further improvement. Although

several bugs were detected by the students during the

labs, the overall evaluation was very positive. They

especially appreciated that they were able to develop

a robotic application in a short time and run it on a real

hardware. NetBeans IDE with the prepared code tem-

plates increased the speed of the development process

as it provides all modern tools for writing, debugging,

and running a code.

Students at CTU use the SyRoTek system in Prac-

tical Robotics course in the winter semester 2011/12.

The course is designed as introductory and its aim is

to create an interest in the ideas and possibilities of

intelligent mobile robotics. Therefore, the emphasis

is given to individual student’s work under teacher’s

supervision in the laboratories. The course consist of

six theoretical lectures lasting 90 minutes each at the

beginning of the semester and fourteen lab sessions,

where there is one session per week and lasts 135 min-

utes. The task to be solved in the labs is a modiﬁca-

tion of the exploration problem – the goal is to ﬁnd

mines randomly placed in the environment. The robot

knows its position exactly and is equipped with a laser

range-ﬁnder measuring the distance to obsacles, and

mine-detector detecting mines close to the robot. On

the other hand the map of the environment is not avail-

able, so the robot has to build it on its own. The course

is attended by 18 students split into teams by two or

three. The students were introduced to the SyRoTek

system at ﬁrst two sessions, when they solved obsta-

cle avoidance task. After that, they began to solve the

exploration task, working in the simulator at the ﬁrst.

From the middle of semester, the students have started

CSEDU2012-4thInternationalConferenceonComputerSupportedEducation

210

experiments with real robots, initially in the lab with

help of the teacher during time dedicated for sessions.

After several attempts, they started to use the system

individually either from the lab at the university or

from home. At the end of the semester, all the groups

presented their functioning code on real robots.

6 CONCLUSIONS

Two interfaces mediating user’s access to the Sy-

RoTek platform were introduced. Each of these inter-

faces has its own purpose and they are complemen-

tary to each other. While the web pages are an input

gate to the system and serve as a source of informa-

tion for incomers as well as for regular system users,

the NetBeans environment extended by a set of plu-

gins facilitates particularly a whole process of user’s

control application development.

Experience from the courses taught with the sup-

port of SyRoTek shows that both interfaces are in-

separable parts of the system and widely used by the

users. Especially the NetBeans IDE is appreciated by

the users in general as they have previous experience

with it or a similar IDE so they do not need to change

their programming habits. IDE is also suitable for be-

ginners, because it provides many functionalities by

one click only and thus familiarization with it is fast.

As mentioned, the current programming interface

is based on Player/Stage system, which is simple to

use and widely expanded in the robotic community.

On the other hand, this system is being substituted by

the Robot Operating System (ROS) (Robot Operating

System, 2011), popularity of which is rapidly increas-

ing. Interfacing SyRoTek into ROS together with re-

lated changes in IDE is therefore one of the main ac-

tivities for the future. Moreover, more courses will be

offered by the system and these will be advertised to

other universities.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

This work has been supported by the Ministry of Ed-

ucation of the Czech Republic under the project No.

7E08006 and by the EU FP7 project No. ICT-216342.

The support of the Grant Agency of the Czech Techni-

cal University in Prague to O. Fi

ser is also gratefully

acknowledged.

REFERENCES

Altin, H., Pedaste, M., and Aabloo, A. (2010). Robotics

in education: Methods of getting schools involved

in robotics project in Estonia. Autonomous Robots,

pages 421–428.

Chudoba, J., Faigl, J., Kulich, M., Krajn

ık, T., Kosnar,

K., and Preucil, L. (2011). A technical solution of

a robotic e-learning system in the syrotek project. In

Verbraeck, A., Helfert, M., Cordeiro, J., and Shishkov,

B., editors, CSEDU (1), pages 412–417. SciTePress.

Gerkey, B. P., Vaughan, R. T., and Howard, A. (2003). The

player/stage project: Tools for multi-robot and dis-

tributed sensor systems. In In Proceedings of the 11th

Int. Conf. on Advanced Robotics, pages 317–323.

Kulich, M., Faigl, J., Ko

snar, K., P

reu

cil, L., and Chu-

doba, J. (2009). SyRoTek - On an e-Learning Sys-

tem for Mobile Robotics and Artiﬁcial Intelligence.

In ICAART 2009, volume 1, pages 275–280, Set

ubal.

INSTICC Press.

Pek

arov

a, J. (2008). Using a programmable toy at preschool

age : Why and how. In Simulation Modeling and

Programming for Autonomous Robots First Int. Conf.

SIMPAR, pages 112–121.

Rhino (2008). http://www.cs.uni-bonn.de/

rhino/tourguide.

Robot Operating System (2011). http://www.ros.org.

Robotoy (2008). http://robotoy.elec.uow.edu.au.

Saucy, P. and Mondada, F. (1998). Khepontheweb: One

year of access to a mobile robot on the internet. In

Proceedings of the 1998 IEEE/RSJ Int. Conf. on In-

telligent Robots and Systems IROS 1998. Piscataway,

NJ, IEEE.

Siegwart, R. and Sauc, P. (May 1999). Interacting mobile

robots on the web. In Proceedings of the 1999 IEEE

Int. Conf. on Robotics and Automation.

Simmons, R., Fernandez, J. L., Goodwin, R., Koenig, S.,

and O’Sullivan, J. (2000). Lessons learned from

xavier. Robotics and Automation Magazine, pages 733

– 39.

ockelmayr, K., Tesar, M., and Hofmann, A. (2011).

Kindergarten children programming robots: A ﬁrst at-

tempt. In RiE 2011 - 2nd Int. Conf. on Robotics in

Education, pages 185–192.

Telegarden (2008). http://goldberg.berkeley.edu/garden/Ars.

Telescope (2008). http://www.telescope.org.

USER'SACCESSTOTHEROBOTICE-LEARNINGSYSTEM-SyRoTek

211