ieee transaction on education 1

IEEE TRANSACTION ON EDUCATION 1

SyRoTek - Distance Teaching of Mobile RoboticsMiroslav Kulich, Jan Chudoba, Karel Kosnar, Tomas Krajnık, Jan Faigl, Libor Preucil

Abstract—E-learning is a modern and effective approach fortraining in various areas and at different levels of education. Thispaper gives an overview of SyRoTek - an e-learning platformfor mobile robotics, artificial intelligence, control engineeringand related domains. SyRoTek provides remote access to a setof fully autonomous mobile robots placed in a restricted areawith dynamically reconfigurable obstacles, which enables solvinga huge variety of problems. A user is able to control the robots inreal-time by their own developed algorithms as well as being ableto analyze gathered data and observe activity of the robots byprovided interfaces. The system is currently used for education atthe Czech Technical University in Prague and at the Universityof Buenos Aires, and it is freely accessible to other institutions. Inaddition to the system overview, the paper presents the experiencegained from the actual deployment of the system in teachingactivities.

Index Terms—Educational technology, mobile robots, robotprogramming, telerobotics, user interfaces

I. INTRODUCTION

ARTIFICIAL intelligence and mobile robotics play anincreasingly important role in everyday life and are

becoming an inseparable part of many industrial applications.This creates higher demands on the education of new profes-sionals who must not only operate advanced robotic systemsbut also understand their behaviors so as to be able to designthem and their particular components. According to currenttrends in education, even in kindergartens young childrenbecome familiar with the world of science and technology byplaying with robotic toys like Bee-Bot [1], [2]. Older childrenin primary and secondary schools use construction kits likeLego Mindstorms or Fischertechnik to design and build theirown robots and program and control these models making useof a graphical software [3], [4]. These initial training activitiesintroduce them to the basic principles of robotics and motivatethem to further study of technical domains.

However, these robotic toys suffer from poor sensor equip-ment and fragile construction, which means they cannot beused for real-world and long-term experiments. Universitiesteaching robotics use more powerful platforms like VidereErratic or Pioneer, and build their own robots equipped withstate-of-the-art sensors. The main drawbacks of this approachare the initial cost and the necessity for continuous mainte-nance that can be costly and time-consuming. This is evenmore significant when more than one robot is used.

An alternative to acquiring and maintaining such equipmentlies in sharing the required robotic hardware between severalinstitutions. Altin [5] presents a robotic theater, where a projectteam equipped with Lego Mindstorms robots visits schools in

The authors are with the Department of Cybernetics, Faculty of ElectricalEngineering, Czech Technical University in Prague, Technicka 2, 166 27Prague, Czech Republic.(email:{kulich,imr}@labe.felk.cvut.cz)

Estonia to attract them to join a national educational roboticproject. Furthermore, virtual laboratories that allow the controlof real robots over the Internet have been investigated anddeveloped by several robotic labs. Early teleoperating systemsdeveloped in the nineties allow a user to view and interactwith a single hardware device (either a robotic arm or a mobilerobot) [6], [7], [8], [9]. One of the first integrated, remotelycontrolled robotic systems is the ARL Netrolab project [10],started at the University of Reading, U.K., in 1993. It allowscontrol of a robotic arm and provides access to selectedsensor equipment (sonars, infrared range finders, and a setof cameras). The e-laboratory project [11] combines a remoterobotic platform with a virtual laboratory.

While there are many remote labs with robotic arms,remotely controlled mobile robots are not so common. Oneof most popular systems was developed in the RobOnWebproject at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lau-sanne (EPFL) [12]. Five fundamental services of the Webinterface were defined: chat, video, robot control, virtual robotrepresentation, and logging. Several setups were developedwithin the project, differing mainly in the robot platforms andsensors used: TeleRoboLab, AliceOnWeb, Koala on the Web,and Pygmalion on the Web. In the REAL project [13], fourframes were used to provide remote access to an autonomousmobile robot. The first frame provides the basic access to thelaboratory and reservation system. The second frame realizesthe tele-operated access to the robot. The additional frame al-lows the user’s navigation module (written in C programminglanguage) to control the robot. During the autonomous robotnavigation, sensor data are collected by the user’s module andstored in the dedicated user space for a further processing. Thelast frame represents a distance learning module.

A Web-based remote laboratory that gives an opportunityto remotely experiment with various navigation algorithms ona mobile robot is described in [14]. The system consists ofa Web interface for uploading the user’s program to the robot,accessing the on-board video camera, and monitoring variousstate variables. The software framework provided is built onthe Microsoft Robotics Studio.

A combination of a simulated environment with a physicalset-up was applied in the LearnNet project [15]. The VRMLtechnology was used to model the real environment at the userside, while only coordinates of objects are transmitted over theInternet. A set of robots is accessible for users in the Virtuallabproject [16]. Several cameras monitored a playing field anda user can use a combination of several views to get betteroverview of the robots’ movements. The robots can be con-trolled remotely via the ActiveX technology or by a programin C++, Delphi or Java. An open source solution based on thePlayer/Stage framework [17] was planned in another virtualrobotic laboratory project [18], which unfortunately seems to

This is a preprint version of the article: Kulich, M., Chudoba, J., Košnar, K., Krajník, T., Faigl, J., and Přeučil, L. (2013). SyRoTek ‑ DistanceTeaching of Mobile Robotics. IEEE Transactions on Education, 56(1), which has been published in a final form athttps://doi.org/10.1109/TE.2012.2224867.

© 2013 IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. Permission from IEEE must be obtained for all other uses, in any current or future media, includingreprinting/republishing this material for advertising or promotional purposes, creating new collective works, for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, orreuse of any copyrighted component of this work in other works.

https://doi.org/10.1109/TE.2012.2224867


be no longer active. Teleworkbench [19] is a complex systemthat allows multi-robot experiments with Khepera and Bee-Botrobots in an environment automatically built and controlledby a gripper. It provides precise robot localization based onimage processing, on-line video stream and video recording,GUI with augmented reality for robot control, and a toolfor experiment analysis. However, this system is currentlyunavailable.

The design of the SyRoTek (http://syrotek.felk.cvut.cz) sys-tem, presented here is inspired by the aforementioned projects,and so is similar to them in many ways. Modern technologies,tools, hardware and software components used in the systemincrease its robustness and usability and allow it to outperformthe foregoing systems at least in the following aspects:

1) Number of robots – SyRoTek offers 13 robots thatare permanently (except when being charged) availableto users. All these robots can be used simultaneouslyallowing multi-robot experiments.

2) Sensor equipment – The robots are equipped with a hugeset of standard sensors used in robotics. To the bestof the authors’ knowledge, the SyRoTek system is theonly system providing access to robots with laser range-finders. The modular architecture of the SyRoTek robothardware design means that they can easily be equippedwith new additional sensors in the future.

3) Interfaces to robotic frameworks – SyRoTek provides in-terfaces to Player/Stage and ROS, software frameworkswidely used in the robotic community. SyRoTek isprobably the only virtual laboratory providing interfacesfor these two widely used frameworks. To the authors’best knowledge, no other virtual laboratory connectseven to one of these frameworks. The current systemsprovide their own interfaces or are based on a close-source and commercial software (Webots).

The rest of this paper is organized as follows. The nextsection gives an overview of the system and describes itskey components. Section III presents courses taught with thesupport of the SyRoTek system, while Section IV discussesstatistics gathered when using the system for educationalpurposes. Concluding remarks are presented in Section V.

II. SYSTEM OVERVIEW

SyRoTek is a complex system consisting of many hardwareand software components that are connected together and com-municate using defined interfaces, Fig. 1. The main compo-nents are 13 mobile robots operating in an enclosed space – theArena. The robots communicate through WiFi with the Controlcomputer that mediates a user’s access to the robots. Moreover,it provides key functionalities of the system – manages theactual state of the robots and the Arena, prepares the robotsaccording to reservations, manages information about usersand the tasks they solve, stores teaching material and users’files, and so on. The Video server processes video streams fromthe cameras placed over the Arena and Localization providesinformation about the positions of the robots in the Arena.

The key feature of the system is the ability to controlthe robots with applications developed by the user. The

Fig. 1: SyRoTek overview.

Player/Stage framework has been selected as the main pro-gramming interface, because it is widely used in the roboticcommunity; it supports a variety of mobile robots and sensors,and contains a huge library of state-of-the-art algorithms forobstacle avoidance, planning, localization, etc. The Stage isa simulator, which substitutes for real hardware with the sameinterface. The user can therefore develop his/her code with thesimulator and that same code, with no or few modifications,can be used for a real robot. Player drivers for SyRoTek havebeen developed that provide access to the individual robots.The user can therefore use these robots in the same way asany other robots/devices via standard Player proxies.

With the increasing popularity of ROS (Robot OperatingSystem) [20], the users also requested support for this frame-work. The internal communication within the SyRoTek isbased on a developed efficient middle-ware for real-time datacollection, which does not add the overheads typically causedby the message marshaling. Therefore, an additional interfacecan easily be developed, and the ROS interface was addedinto SyRoTek recently; the robots are thus accessible as ROSnodes providing all robots’ sensors.

A. RobotsThe SyRoTek robot is called S1R and its body consists of

the main chassis and an optional sensor module [21]. Therobot is based on a differential drive with a maximal velocitydesigned to be 0.35 ms−1 and operating time about eighthours. The on-board computer (OBC) is the Gumstix OveroFire module with the ARM Cortex-A8 OMAP3530 processorunit operating at 600 MHz and running the Linux kernel.The connection with the control computer is provided by theintegrated WiFi module of the Overo board.

The chassis serves as a carrier of basic sensors: five infraredrange finders (Sharp GP2D120), three sonars (DevantechSRF10), twelve floor sensors, and a compass (Philips KMZ51).A camera module based on Gumstix Caspa will be added inthe next revision. In addition, temperatures are measured invarious places on the robot body. The currents to the motorsare measured to provide the so-called software bumpers.

Additional sensors can be connected as a so-called frontsensor module to the sensor bus, or directly to the OBC. Two


Fig. 2: SyRoTek Arena (left) and S1R robot (right).

types of the mountable front sensor module are available. Thefirst module is equipped with three sonars and three infraredrange sensors and it is connected to the sensor bus. The secondmodule is the laser range finder Hokuyo URG-04LX and it isconnected to the OBC via the USB interface.

B. Arena

The Arena is an enclosed space where the robots operatetogether with supporting subsystems: charging, lighting, andlocalization and visualization cameras. The size of the Arena,3.5 m × 3.8 m, is constrained by the space available in thededicated computer lab where it is located, Fig. 2. The Arenacontains an open area for multi-robot exercises (e.g., formationcontrol, flocking behaviors, etc.) and a maze-like area intendedfor localization, mapping and navigation tasks, Fig. 3.

The Arena is designed to be reconfigurable without need ofhuman intervention. This feature is achieved by installing 37movable obstacles, which can be retracted under the surface inless than ten seconds. These movable obstacles allow variousconfigurations of the Arena to be prepared before a userstarts solving his/her task, and tasks to be defined withina dynamically changing environment. The Arena workspacecan also be divided into several separate closed areas, to createindependent working spaces. The other fifty obstacles arefixed, but can be removed manually, so a major reconfigurationof the Arena is possible by human intervention. The retractableobstacles are controlled through the Player interface, thereforea user can modify the environment even during the experiment(if this is permitted for the current task).

When a robot finishes the user’s task (i.e., the user’s reser-vation is expired) it autonomously navigates into a dockingstation. Thirteen docking stations are located at one side ofthe Arena and each dock allows automatic recharging of therobot. A completely discharged robot is fully charged in aboutone to two hours.

C. Localization

The purpose of the localization system is to determine thepositions and headings of individual robots in the Arena.The system consists of a camera mounted above the Arena,a dedicated PC, and identification patterns attached to the topof each robot. The patterns consist of a black arc used forposition and heading determination, and a circular binary code

Fig. 3: Schematic (left) and real (right) view of the Arena.The movable obstacles (squares and rectangles) are light, thefixed obstacles are dark.

used for robot identification. An image processing algorithm isbased on convolution filtering and runs at 12.5 Hz. The systemhas proven to be capable of continuous and errorless operationfor extended periods of time (several weeks) with precision of±1 cm in robot position and ±3◦ in robot orientation.

Information provided by the localization system is usedmainly for system purposes (docking and preparation ofrobots) and for visualization. Users can access this informationonly when it is explicitly allowed in the task definition writtenby the task creator (teacher).

D. Visualization

The visualization subsystem provides information about theactual situation in the Arena, and allows on-line monitoringof experiments. In addition, it facilitates creation of off-linevideos for demonstration, archiving, and evaluations [22].

The hardware part of the subsystem consists of three IPcameras placed above the Arena. One camera provides anoverview and two cameras scan opposite sides of the Arena.The video streams are transmitted to the video server, fromwhich they are streamed to users over the Internet in severalformats and resolutions. Furthermore, the streams are stored onthe server for a further download and off-line editing and view-ing. A user can watch the video on-line with GStreamer [23],or from the SyRoTek Web pages, through an embedded viewer.The last possibility is to use a so-called “schematic view” –a html5 canvas on which the robots and obstacles are drawnaccording to their positions from the localization system andinformation about the state of the retractable obstacles, Fig. 3.This technique avoids the necessity of transmitting large videofiles, and is therefore suitable for low-bandwidth networks.

Moreover, Stage has been modified to be a stand-alone ap-plication, with fully customizable multi-view support, able toplay embedded video and visualize real sensor data, providinganother way for users to watch the current situation in theArena.

E. User Interfaces

A user can access SyRoTek by three interfaces: Web pages,NetBeans integrated development environment (IDE), and thecommand line interface. The Web facilitates a user’s first steps


with the system, and helps with administration and pedagog-ical tasks. It provides links to documentation, news about thesystem, video files, live video streams from the Arena, andserves as the main source of information about courses offered.At this time, the system offers several standard courses eachconsisting of: lectures, assignments, and quizzes. The lecturescontain supporting material like slides, references, etc., whilethe assignments specify a particular problem to be solvedtogether with its software and hardware requirements. Thequizzes are web forms consisting of several questions that thestudents are requested to answer to prove their understandingof the presented topic.

The aforementioned materials are accessible for both non-registered and registered users. Registered users can enroll inthe courses, solve the assignments, take quizzes on these tasks,and above can reserve the Arena and the robots. These userscan also communicate with teachers, system administrators,and other users on the forums provided.

The Web also supports teacher activities: course creationand editing, course copying from an existing course, quiz andtask creation and automatic evaluation. A teacher can displaya list of students in a course, evaluate particular tasks andquizzes, and manually modify the evaluation. The Web (withinformation about student’s reservations) provides an overviewof student activities and progress and gives a teacher a fullcontrol of the teaching process.

A substantial part of students’ work with SyRoTek is relatedto writing, compiling, and debugging source codes. Therefore,a set of plug-ins were developed to enhance capabilities of theNetBeans IDE supporting the development process, especiallyfor inexperienced users. The enhancements allow users toeasily start developing applications for SyRoTek within theselected IDE. The provided plug-ins bring the comfort ofcode completing, context help, visual debugging, and accessto components of the SyRoTek system.

SyRoTek provides its own project template, which allowsthe user to choose the course and the task to be solved. Thetemplate prepared by the teacher for the given task is loaded tothe IDE automatically, as a new project with a skeleton codeand the settings of the application to be developed, as well asthe Player/Stage configuration files for both simulation runsand experiments with the real robots.

The plug-ins integrate Player and Stage into the IDE. Theintegrated visualization window provided by the modifiedStage allows easy monitoring of the experiment. Moreover,the user’s application and Player can be run from the IDEeither locally or at the control computer with one click, whiletheir output is redirected to the Output window within theIDE. The user can test the code in the Stage simulator first,and after that run the application with real robots.

The plug-ins also provide access to live video streams fromthe visualization cameras, SyRoTek web, and the reservationforms. To simplify the reservation process, the course and taskare preselected as corresponding to the current project; the useronly has to select a reservation time and a required duration.

Advanced users, who prefer a command-line environment,can use standard Unix tools and a set of SyRoTek scripts

providing the same functionality as the SyRoTek Netbeansplug-ins.

III. COURSES

Since 2011, the SyRoTek system has been used in coursestaught at the Czech Technical University in Prague (CTU),Czech Republic and the University of Buenos Aires (UBA),Argentina. The Introduction to Mobile Robotics course, givenas a part of School of Informatics at UBA in July 2011, wasattended by 70 students with different a priori knowledgeof robotics (ranging from beginners to postgraduate studentsstudying robotics). The aim of the course was to introducestudents to the main problems, and the available solutions, incontrolling an autonomous mobile robot. Eight lessons provid-ing a theoretical overview of the field were accompanied bythree-hour practical labs, where students solved wall follow-ing, obstacle avoidance or wandering problems independentlyin teams of two or three under teacher supervision. Throughoutthe course, the students worked with SyRoTek as a source ofteaching materials, a communication channel with the teacher,to complete quizzes, and mainly as an experimental platform.The work in the lab, scheduled at the end of the course,was performed in the university computer laboratory, whereSyRoTek client software (NetBeans with the SyRoTek plug-ins, and the extended Player/Stage) was installed.

Although the students had no previous experience withdeveloping a robotic application or even little programmingexperience, all the teams were able to control the robot inthe simulator in the given time. Some applications were notperfect, as the controlled robots were colliding with obstacles.However, applications of three teams were able to controlreal robots in Prague using the SyRoTek server. A live videoshowing the real situation in the Arena was projected on thelab wall, letting the students to see the real behavior of therobots controlled by their applications.

At CTU, the SyRoTek system was engaged in the PracticalRobotics course in the winter semester 2011/2012. This intro-ductory course is designed to create an interest in intelligentmobile robotics, and therefore, the emphasis is on the super-vised individual student’s work. The course consists of six 90-minute theoretical lectures followed by fourteen 135-minuteweekly lab sessions. The task to be solved is an explorationproblem – a robot navigation program to create a map of theenvironment. The course was attended by 12 students split intoteams of two or three. The students became familiar with thesystem after first few sessions, then they were able to workindividually. At the end of the semester, all the students wereable to perform the exploration using the real robots.

Moreover, about ten students used SyRoTek during theirBachelor’s or diploma theses in the areas of multi-robotexploration, formation control and swarm robotics.

IV. EVALUATION

The users/students of SyRoTek-based courses are encour-aged to use Subversion (SVN) [24] – a version control systemfor a comfortable and convenient management of sourcecodes. Beside simplification and organization of a development


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process, SVN supports code sharing between students workingin the same team and with the teacher, who can review thestudents’ code and suggests corrections by adding notes to thesource codes. This frees the teacher from tedious managementof e-mail correspondence and attachments.

It is also a powerful tool for plagiarism detection andavoidance - it generates various statistics of a user’s usageof the system that can reveal non-standard behaviors. Forexample, it is suspicious when there is no activity in a student’srepository during the whole semester and a near-final solutionappears just before a submission deadline.

Presentation of SVN statistics to students can be used toemphasize an importance of continuous work. Fig. 4 showsthe activity in the SVN repository (a number of commits) ofselected teams attending the Practical Robotics course in thewinter semester 2011/2012. It is not surprising that the activityof all teams increased significantly before the deadline. Noticethat teams had different habits when working with SVN.

A full operation of SyRoTek started in October 2011 at thebeginning of the winter semester at CTU. Data of Arena reser-vations collected from that time until the middle of May 2012

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Fig. 6: Arena reservations depending on time of day.

show other interesting behaviors of all SyRoTek users andtheir usage of the system. The users are mainly CTU studentsof the Practical Robotics course (48.5% of reservations) andstudents preparing their bachelor/diploma theses (22.7%), butalso include teachers (19.8%), SyRoTek administrators (4.5%),and individual users from other universities (4.6%).

Users made 487.5 hours of Arena reservations during thewhole monitored period (32 weeks), which is approximately15.5 reserved hours per week in the average. Several userssolved tasks with multiple (from two to six) robots; thenumber of reserved robot-hours is 1376. The system workloadvaried during the semester as can be seen in Fig. 5. Theusers reserved the Arena continuously after a few “warm-up” weeks with increased activity before the deadlines.Therewas no course scheduled in the summer semester (starting2012/6), and therefore, it was mainly students finishing theirtheses who used the system. Although the total number ofreservations decreased, the shape of the reservation curve issimilar. A wider peak, just before the deadline, is caused by thecomplexity of the theses, which is higher than for a seminarwork in the Practical robotics course.

In Fig. 6, Arena reservation depending on the time of theday is shown (only users from Central European Time Zonewere considered in this case). As expected, the majority of thereservations fell during standard working hours between 8amand 6pm. On the other hand, about 22% of the reservationswere made for other times, a few of them even at night. Itis also shown that users made reservations according to theirspreferences and not according to availability of the teacher.Moreover, they worked not only from university laboratories,but also from their homes and dormitories, which is morecomfortable for them. This is impossible with standard sys-tems, where the assistance of a teacher is needed and robotichardware has to be used in dedicated laboratories.

V. CONCLUSION

SyRoTek is a complex robotic e-learning system. Besidesstandard single-robot tasks, it allows its users to perform multi-robot experiments with robots having rich sensor equipment in


a high variety of scenarios. The users especially appreciate be-ing able to develop a robotic application rapidly and run it onreal hardware without having to solve problems with hardwaremanagement, robot charging, and environment preparation.They welcome, too, being able to perform experiments notonly from dedicated locations in working hours but also atthe time and place that suits them best. Moreover, NetBeansIDE with the prepared code templates increases the speedof the development process (especially at the beginning ofdevelopment) as it provides all modern tools for writing,debugging, and running a code and allows the users to focuson solving the task itself.

Unlike the previous mobile robotics courses taught at theCTU, where less than 20% of the students have been able toimplement and test their assignments with real robots withina given deadline, all the students using the SyRoTek systementirely completed their assignments. SyRoTek also increasedstudent interest in mobile robotics courses. While the atten-dance at the Practical Robotics course and its predecessorswas almost stable (around 10 students) in the last five years,24 students enrolled the course for the next year.

ACKNOWLEDGMENT

This work was supported by the Technology Agency ofthe Czech Republic under the project No. TE01020197, byMinistry of Education of the Czech Republic under theProjects No. 7AMB12AR022, and 2C06005. The Ministry ofScience of Argentina supported this work by the Project No.ARC/11/11.

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Miroslav Kulich received the Ph.D. degree in Artificial Intelligence andBiocybernetics from the Czech Technical University, Prague, Czech Republic,in 2004.

His research interests include planning for multi-robot systems, computa-tional geometry for robotics, and education of mobile robotics.

Jan Chudoba is currently pursuing the Ph.D. degree in Artificial Intelligenceand Biocybernetics at the Czech Technical University, Prague, Czech Repub-lic.

His research interests include robotic hardware, and sensor data processing.

Karel Kosnar received the Ph.D. degree in Artificial Intelligence andBiocybernetics from the Czech Technical University, Prague, Czech Republic,in 2011.

His research interests include topological mapping, robot autonomousnavigation, and long-term autonomy.

Tomas Krajnık received the Ph.D. degree in Artificial Intelligence and Bio-cybernetics from the Czech Technical University, Prague, Czech Republic, in2012.

His research interests include autonomous navigation, reasoning in mobilerobotics, and aerial robots.

Jan Faigl received the Ph.D. degree in Artificial Intelligence and Biocyber-netics from the Czech Technical University, Prague, Czech Republic, in 2010.

His research interests include multi-goal planning, motion planning forhigh dimensional systems, and autonomous robotic systems.


Libor Preucil received the Ph.D. degree in Technical Cybernetics from theCzech Technical University, Prague, Czech Republic, in 1993.

His research focuses on robot sensing, mapping, and navigation.

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