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.


Public Summary Month 10/2012

The past two months saw further investigation and first result of the graphical programming system for intuitively creating robot applications in mobile manipulation.  The necessary infrastructure for running the graphically created robot application has been further developed, together with the building blocks (like 3D perception, base and arm motion) used to graphically created robot applications. A first public beta release is planned in the coming weeks.