Micael S. Couceiro

Tailoring a ROS Educational Programming Language Architecture

With its impressive rise in popularity within education at all levels, Robotics is a rapidly growing field merging science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM). Nevertheless, the lack of standards in educational robotics has led to several issues, namely little (or almost no) code reuse between educational robotics curriculum from different schools, large dependency on proprietary solutions, and endless paradigm shifting between text, visual and flow programming languages. This paper proposes a novel educational programming language architecture to teach students how to program robots. The architecture combines the Robot Operating System (ROS) quasi-standard with the Snap! visual programming language, targeting students from primary education to high school. As opposed to the limited alternatives available in ROS, the solution proposed does not require the acquisition of any robotic platform, running directly on the browser, and benefiting from the power of the internet to program ROS-enabled real and simulated robots.

RobotCraft: The First International Collective Internship for Advanced Robotics Training

This paper describes a two-month summer collective internship conceived to provide a unique hands-on experience in robotics. The objective of the Robotics Craftsmanship International Academy, or RobotCraft for short, is to introduce higher education students in the full design cycle of a mobile robotic platform, providing training in computer-aided design (CAD), mechatronics, low-level programming of embedded systems, high-level development using the Robot Operating System (ROS), and artificial intelligence. This non-academic teaching, which successfully completed its second edition, already encompassed around 150 students and 100 universities, being evaluated by participants as challenging, engaging, and beneficial not only to their overall understanding of robotics, but also guiding them through their future academic and professional endeavors.