Solutions for Inexpensive Remote Robots for Education
Get your pile of Lego EV3 robots moving, and let your remote access students do real robotics and via teleoperation.
You have a classroom set of Lego robots and no classroom of kids to use them on. Sending a robot home with a kid may initially sound like a good idea, but there’s a really good chance that they’ll lose the parts (which aren’t cheap), and their parents won’t be much help with programming, leading to real frustration. Why not set up an arena at school, a library, or any other convenient place (your basement?), where the robots can be operated safely and let students just log in and control a robot?
We’ve been researching what resources exist to support this effectively, easily, and inexpensively. We’ve found some great options, and some options that still need some significant development. Here are some of the avenues we’ve been exploring, and one that should work straight out of the box: Open Roberta
Trade Study in Educational Telerobotics
Block-Based Web Programming with Open Roberta
This solution works! Here’s our guide.
Open Roberta is a block-based web programmer similar to Scratch that runs on the cloud. It’s specifically designed to work with the Lego EV3 over Wifi. Now your students can command robots from wherever, for an approximate cost of $30/robot (for wifi adapters and SD cards), and a web cam accessory for a computer. Install is reasonably quick, but does require use of the EV3Dev operating system. See our guide for more information, or take a look at Open Roberta Lab for EV3 running EV3Dev. Yes, it works with other flavors of robot too!
Netsblox: Networking Capable Block-Based Web Programming
Netsblox is a free cloud-based open-source block based programmer based on Snap! (the OOP descendant of Scratch), run out of Vanderbilt University, with funding from the NSF. It adds networking capability to Snap!, so not only can you communicate with your robot over the web, you can also have your robot coordinate actions with other robots over the web in real time.
Status: Additional firmware required to add onto EV3Dev to interface with Netsblox. Assessing the impact and cost.
Vanderbilt University has run remote robots on Netsblox before, and built their own custom firmware to do so.
Web-Based Python Code & Upload
Via a remotely run server on a computer or virtual machine, users upload and command code via a web interface. Coding is done independently using any Python editor (like OpenStudioCode or IDLE), and then uploaded when ready.
Status: Estimating cost of development.
We’ve successfully enabled a robot and a computer to be connected to a Google Cloud VM. Via SSH and reverse-SSH the user can log into an EV3 running the EV3Dev operating system and write code directly onto the vehicle, or transfer files, and run it. There is no web GUI at this time. The process is based on this video.
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