A Remote/Virtual Robotics Lab

摘要

In this Work-In-Progress paper, we describe our vision for a remote/virtual robotics lab and our progress towards realizing it. Robotics has been taught at our institution for four years with enrollment growing each year. Our program is part of the undergraduate Bachelor of Science in Computer Science and has an equal focus on robotics theory and practice, with the “Robot Operating System” (ROS) running on students' own computers, and a small robotics learning lab with a variety of ROS based robots. Our pandemic experience during 2020 led us to invest in a cloud-based shared “cloud” environment running on a Kubernetes cluster. We learned that there are real advantages to this in terms of scale and geographical reach. The success of this with our students, our Covid experience, preparation for teaching in our lab, and planning towards return to campus led directly to this work-in-progress paper, where we define, in one abstraction, a remote/virtual robotics learning lab, unifying local and remote access to both simulated and real robots. This work aims to extend our existing shared virtual cloud-based robotics learning environment and combine it with a remote-controlled robotics lab.