Distributed Robotics Education

Abstract

Distributed robotics takes many forms, for instance, multirobots, modular robots, and self-reconfigurable robots. The understanding and development of such advanced robotic systems demand extensive knowledge in engineering and computer science. In this paper, we describe the concept of a distributed educational system as a valuable tool for introducing students to interactive parallel and distributed processing programming as the foundation for distributed robotics and human-robot interaction development. This is done by providing an educational tool that enables problem representation to be changed, related to multirobot control and human-robot interaction control from virtual to physical representation. The proposed system is valuable for bringing a vast number of issues into education – such as parallel programming, distribution, communication protocols, master dependency, connectivity, topology, island modeling software behavioral models, adaptive interactivity, feedback, and user interaction. We show how the proposed system can be considered a tool for easy, fast, flexible hands-on exploration of these distributed robotic issues. Through examples, we show how to implement interactive parallel and distributed processing in robotics with different software models such as openloop, randomness-based, rule-based, user-interactionbased, AI- and ALife-based, and morphology-based control.