Research library

Open Remote Web Lab for Learning Robotics and ROS With Physical and Simulated Robots in an Authentic Developer Environment

Teaching robotics with the robot operating system (ROS) is valuable for instating good programming practices but requires significant setup steps from the learner. Providing a readymade ROS learning environment over the web can make robotics more accessible; however, most of the previous remote labs have abstracted the authentic ROS developer environment either for didactical or technological reasons, or do not give the possibility to program physical robots. In this article, we present a remote web lab that employs virtual network computing and Docker to serve in-browser desktop workstations, where learning tasks can be completed on both the physical and simulated robots. The learners can reserve access to the remote lab through a learning management interface, which also includes tools for administering the remote lab. The system allows anyone to experiment with ROS without configuring any software locally and was successfully trialed in an online ROS.

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Publication details

Organizations
🇪🇪 University of Tartu
Year
2024
Type
Journal

Relevancy to Gratheon

This paper is relevant to Gratheon because it informs the long-term autonomous-apiary and robotic intervention roadmap. Its methods and findings can be translated into product requirements for reliable field deployments: what should be sensed, how signals should be interpreted, and which uncertainty or validation limits need to be surfaced to beekeepers. For Gratheon, the work is most useful as an evidence-backed design reference for connecting local hive observations with actionable recommendations in the web app while keeping hardware practical for remote apiaries.