Improving Usability of a Web-Based Platform for Teaching Robotics Engineering

Unibotics is an open online web framework for robotics engineering in higher education. It allows practical learning of robot programming from the web browser, and fits both distance and face to face education. It includes more than twenty robotics challenges illustrating mobile robotics concepts (navigation, control, localization, mapping, etc.), service robotics (drones, autonomous driving, vacuum cleaners, logistics), and DeepLearning (image classification, object detection). It is based on Python language, ROS middleware and Gazebo simulator. A new version has been released with internal refactoring and improved frontend, based on REACT library. A pilot study has been carried out with 110 real students from three different Spanish universities using it in three 12-week courses. The usability of the new Unibotics has been measured and compared to previous release. The questionnaire shows improvements in usability but still some inconsistencies in reliability. No scalability problems happened despite the growth in concurrent users. The platform has also allowed grad students with no prior robotics background to start with robotics engineering.