Needs discussion for ROS education SIG - review of objectives, audiences and settings

[Joe Tojek]

Let's review and discuss from a high level the needs analysis for the SIG from the perspectives of the various intended applications of the members. Please briefly describe your educational objectives and audience, and provide some information about the setting you need to support. This info will help provide context for a more detailed exploration of use cases that we hope to see the image support. Here is my application.

>>> Grades 6 - 10 Robotics beginner <<<
Educational objectives - Use robotics projects to provide context for learning and demonstrating competence in STEM topic areas. I would like to see students solve problems using math and geometry concepts with programming for motion planning much like the original Lego turtle graphics from the 80's.

Audience - Male and female students aged 10 - 15 from diverse backgrounds. Mixed technology experience and skills, need to support non technical users.

Settings - School or learning center computer lab with PC equipment from 2008 or later.

[Jonathan Bohren]

Here's what we're working towards at JHU:

>>> First/Second-Year Graduate Students, Upper-level Undergraduates <<<

Educational objectives - We'd like to offer an "introduction to software for robotic systems" course to give students the tools to implement theoretical results from their research on real robotic hardware. This course should give students some experience in software development patterns for larger robotic systems as well as give them experience dealing with the non-idealities of real sensors and mobile robots / manipulators.

Extracurricular objectives - In addition to educating the students who take the class, we'd like to build a local community of ROS users who not only help their peers implementing experiments to support their research, but also enable them to integrate and collaborate with the larger OSR community as a whole.

Audience - Male and female graduate students and upper-level undergraduates who intend to use robotic systems in their research. The expectation is that they have programming experience, but little experience in building complex software applications with multiple processes and a non-trivial amount of integration.

Settings - University research lab with robot platforms available for use in various projects. Students will be expected to provide or have access to appropriate computational hardware for running simulators and runtime systems.

-j

[Piyush]

Here is what we have at Austin

>>> Freshman Undergraduates <<<

Educational Objectives: Introduce freshmen undergraduate students to research (in general) and specifically in robotics over a 2 semester course. We use our autonomous vehicle as a testbed from the Urban Challenge days which has since been ported over entirely to ROS. We might potentially introduce other ROS-based robots in the future. The goal of this course is to set undergraduates on a path in research, as well as perform better during the 4 years of their undergraduate timespan.

Audience -  Freshmen undergraduate students with a high variance in programming experience -- from negligible to 5-6 years. Typically no prior robotics experience, and no experience in complex software applications and integration. Students are typically encouraged to pick up these skills over the first semester through a number of programming assignments.

Setting - University research lab and ready access to the car. Most of the work is done offline using bags/simulation. ROS is supported by the CS admin on all lab machines, and we also encourage students to install it on their own machines using virtual machines or a separate partition.

Additional Notes - 

1) The main challenge for the students is perhaps not the programming itself. Only about 2-3 students of 25 were unable to write the code for the assignments.

2) ROS concepts, version control systems, the build infrastructure, and understanding the wiki are fairly big challenges. These are some of the main things we have tried to cover in the class.

3) There are a number of ROS related slides available at http://zweb.cs.utexas.edu/users/piyushk/doku.php/courses/spring12. Most of them are based of the ROS tutorials and our code-base.

Thanks,

Piyush

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[Dustin Webb]

First I must qualify that I am a graduate student and don't have much pull. However I am attempting to introduce ROS to the University of Utah students and researchers and my research advisor has expressed interest in my ideas.

>>> Graduates & Advanced Undergraduates <<<
Educational objectives: I'm interested in teaching a seminar introducing students to ROS and how it can be used to simplify their research. I have also been advocating the use of ROS for labs in classes like introduction to robotics and motion planning. I also see this acting as a bridge from simple Arduino specific applications learned by most of our robotics students in their classes to more complete systems.

Extracurricular: A couple of years ago I started a student organization called the RoboUtes the purpose of which was in part to promote robotics amongst incoming students. This group permits younger students to get involved with larger robotics projects. I'm in the process of standardizing the group on ROS to reduce the learning curve for newer students and see the tools developed here as being incredibly helpful in this task.

Audience: Existing and prospective robotics students ranging from inexperienced undergrads to experienced researchers most of which are mechanical engineers. While all students will have some level of programming experience the vast majority will have only written very simple Arduino programs and will not have used Linux. I expect version control and build infrastructure will also be big issues with this audience.

Settings: University classes, research labs, and student club. In the case of research labs students will be provided with hardware but will likely wish to use their own as well. In the case of classes and the student club students will be expected to provide their own hardware until ROS can be made available on lab machines.

Cheers,
--
Dustin Webb

[Bill Morris]

I Heart Engineering

>>> Education and Hackerspaces <<<
Objectives: Provide tools for educators and hackers to incorporate ROS
and robotics into their educational and research objectives, our current
focus is on TurtleBots.

Audience - You

Setting - I Heart Engineering is an Open Source Hardware company with
in-house design and short run manufacturing capabilities. We are also a
licensed manufacturer of the TurtleBot mobile robot.

--
Bill Morris <bi...@iheartengineering.com>
I Heart Engineering
http://www.iheartengineering.com
<3

[Yujin Stonier]

I'm not actually teaching anymore (previously math lecturer), however we (Yujin Robot) are interested in connecting Korean university courses and labs with Ros as it will indirectly benefit us long term as well. At the moment there is alot of interest, but the barriers are high for a non-english, windows-saturated country, so most labs are holding off.

Audience: Grads, undergrads & developers in Korea who currently have an interest in ros but are waiting and watching.

Educational objectives: Initially, to introduce Turtlebot 2 as a simple platform on which Korean graduate students can more easily cross the barriers into the ros world. From there, they can start using it in their research at which point it would be great to see those who have gained experience introducing it to their courses. Ready to go software and (possibly translated) materials/tutorials would greatly help to do this.

Extracurricular: We'd like to run workshops to accelerate the process above.

[Joe Tojek]

Educational objectives - Fields robotics operations training. Ground up training to support field operations for mobile robots, including Linux admin, networking, ROS and RTOS software installation and execution. Includes sensor setup and data aquisition skills as well as remote tele-operation and mobile maipulation training

Audience - Male and female adult learners with diverse backgrounds. Mixed technology experience and skills, need to support non technical users.

[Bill Smart]

My use case is more-or-less the same as Jon's.  I expect all of the students to be able to program in some grown-up language, like C++ or Python, and to be comfortable using computers.

-- Bill

[Joe Tojek]

Thanks Jonathan, this first year undergraduate introductory course seems to be the initial sweet spot target for the SIG in terms of content for the textbook, do you and others agree?  I want to ask about texts that you currently use, I will do so in a top level thread, please take a look. Joe

[Jonathan Bohren]

I'm actually talking about a first year _graduate_ course, but at Hopkins we don't restrict talented undergraduates from taking the course if they are suitably prepared.

-j

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Jonathan Bohren

PhD Student

Dynamical Systems and Control Laboratory

Laboratory for Computational Sensing and Robotics

The Johns Hopkins University

(707) 520-4736

j...@jhu.edu

[Bill Smart]

I think that Jon's course (and mine, which is similar) is probably the
right place to start. If we aim any lower, the I think that we'll be
trying to teach computer science (and mathematics, and the rest) at
the same time we're teaching ROS and robotics. Not that this isn't
valuable, but I don't think that it's a good target for this
particular group.

-- Bill

[Piyush]

I run a first year undergraduate introduction to Robotics course using
ROS (over 2 semesters). Based on this experience, I agree with Bill.
We do spend quite a bit of time outside the lectures teaching some
more basic stuff to the students, and it slows down the progress of
the course. As a consequence, we don't deal with many core robotics
concepts until the second semester.

At this time, I would recommend starting out with the graduate
entry-level course. Once we have a basic draft, those interested can
try and work out something for the freshman undergraduate level.

Piyush