At the start of 2020, as the Covid pandemic forced us to shutter our Robotics Lab, like many, we rushed to create a virtual environment to continue teaching remotely. This has been referred to as “Robots as a service”, according to Chongkun Xia in his scientific article.

Furthermore, kubemetes organisastion was successful in creating a Kubernetes cluster with the requisite software installed and accessible by a web browser. This was a monumental task and taught us a lot. That experience combined with planning for our return to campus led us to ask why our virtual robotics environment could not be married to our physical robotics lab, having both available either locally or remotely.

To some extent, the video clip depicts the RoBox. It constitute the remotely connected robotics laboratory.

What is RoBox? RoBox, the first 24/7 ROS remote robot lab in the world. Remotely connect to a real mobile robot and program it from your location. You don’t need to buy a robot or build a laboratory. Everything is ready here for your robot algorithm testing. What can you do with RoBox? * You can use RoBox to practice robot algorithms for Robot Navigation, doing mapping, localization, path planning, and object avoidance, etc. * You can also use it to practice algorithms of Robot Perception, perform detection and classification of traffic signs and lights based on an analysis of images acquired by the robot's camera. * You can practice fusing sensor data or generate ROS Bags for later uses and much more.

Hands-on experiential learning greatly enhances and is arguably required for learning the fundamentals of robotics. This argument is strongly supported, for example, in “Best Practices

in Robotics Education”, according to Shawna Thomas, where the importance of hands-on work in robotics education is further emphasized. To provide this experience, we have two choices: either students can each have a robot of their own, or we can provide a robotics learning lab for students. Both of these approaches work but have drawbacks. Robots issued to students are expensive and often very challenging for the students to work with. A robotics lab is an excellent solution, but only scales in proportion to its size.

Sources:

  1. Chongkun Xia et al. (2018) “Microservice-based cloud robotics system for intelligent space”. In: Robotics and AutonomousSystems 110 (2018), pp. 139–150. ISSN:09218890. DOI: 10 . 1016 / j . robot .. 10 . 001. URL:https://doi.org/10.1016/j.robot.2018.10.001.
  2. org. Kubernetes, Automated container deployment,
  3. Shawna Thomas (2021). “Best Practices in Robotics Education: Perspectives from an IEEE RAS Women in Engineering Panel [Women in Engineering”. In: IEEE Robotics and Automation Magazine 28.1 , pp. 12–15. ISSN: 1558223X. DOI: 10.1109/MRA.2021.3051833.