Public Summary Month 9/2013

The effort in the past two months was focused on collecting and analyzing user feedback on the usability of the EduFill software toolbox.
The users are the students who were involved in the EPRo course where the toolbox has been used for developing robotic applications.
This includes two activities which are:
1. Analyzing the final report submitted by the students.
2. Organizing a discussion forum with the students.
As expected, both activities provide the EduFill experiment with invaluable insight for the final report and for the sustainability of the results.
The feedback gained is positive with students commenting that the EduFill software toolbox being an innovative tool which invoke their curiosity on further studying the underlying algorithms for robotic functionality provided in the EduFill software toolbox.
With such positive feedback from the user, it can be concluded that the experiment met its goal of creating a software toolbox and teaching material that is attractive and enabling for beginners in robotics to quickly build first applications and study basic principles of robotics.

With this month, the EduFill experiment officially ends.  The software toolbox as well as teaching material is available for public use on the experiment's website http://www.edufill.org and on GitHub.  While officially ended, the experiment partners intent to use the created material in their routine teaching and to occassionally update the software and the teaching material.


Public Summary Month 7/2013

For the final two months of the experiment, we focus on the integrating and finalization of the results from the experiment partners (Bonn-Rhein-Sieg University of Applied Science and University of Verona). This efforts applies to both objectives of the experiment which are the EduFill Software Toolbox and the EduFill Teaching Curricula. For the EduFill Software Toolbox, we integrated the functionality of Lego Mindstorm in two different configuration (NXT-arm and NXT-Base) with the existing ROS based implementation for the KUKA youBot. This integration showcase two important aspects of the EduFill software toolbox:
1. The robot application development environment (EduFill blockly) is robot independent. The same blocks, that built the robot application, work in both robots (Lego Mindstorm and youBot). This characteristic is also attributed to the common use of ROS and its convention.
2. The robot software component is modular and extensible. Given the software components of robotic functionality from NXT-arm and NXT-base, it took less than two weeks to integrate the functionality to the EduFill software component.
For the EduFill Teaching Curricula, the course has been outlined into two full semester courses with each covering the three main domains of robotic functionality in mobile manipulation: 1. Perception, 2. Manipulation and 3. Navigation.  The lectures were adopted and developed from pre-existing running courses in Bonn-Rhein-Sieg University of Applied Science and University of Verona and to a minor part from publicly available teaching materials, i.e. the teaching materials provided from roboticscourseware.org.  We intend to also make our course material available at roboticscourseware.org.
The final two months of the experiment until September are dedicated to further evaluating the results of a 14 weeks test-run at Bonn-Rhein-Sieg University of parts of the teaching material and of the software toolbox in the just completed summer term. In that course, the students experimented in the development of robotic application through the use of EduFill Blockly.