Abstract
The new European Higher Education Area encourages student centred learning, which puts the focus on the learner and his needs, rather than being centred around the teacher’s input. This paper presents an initiative that revolves around the use of a real robot and a robot simulator with two main objectives: make learning programming languages more appealing to undergraduate students, and to have a platform that can be still used in postgraduate and master courses. The interface with the simulator and the real robot has been programmed in Ada, and it is also being used in our current Research and Development projects.
This work has been partially supported by the Spanish CICYT Project EXPLORE (ref. TIN2009-08572) and the Séneca Proyect MISSION-SICUVA (ref. 15374/PI/10).
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
References
The Bologna Process web page, http://ec.europa.eu/education/higher-education/doc1290_en.htm (checked February 2011)
Benlloch-Dualde, J.V., Blanc-Clavero, S.: Adapting Teaching and Assessment Strategies to Enhance Competence-Based Learning in the Framework of The European Convergence Process. In: Proceedings of the 37th ASEE/IEEE Frontiers in Education Conference, Milwaukee, USA (October 2007)
Markham, T., Larmer, J., Ravitz, J.: Project Based Learning. A Guide to Standards-Focused Project Based Learning for Middle and High School Teachers, Buck Institute (2003)
Boud, D., Dunn, J., Hegarty-Hazel, E.: Teaching in Laboratories. Society for Research into Higher Education, Guildford (1986)
Hassan, H., Domnguez, C., Martnez, J.M., Perles, A., Albaladejo, J.: Remote Laboratory Architecture for the Validation of Industrial Control Applications. IEEE Transactions on Industrial Electronics 54(6), 3094–3102 (2007)
Kramer, J., Scheutz, M.: Development environments for autonomous mobile robots: A survey. Autonomous Robots 22(2), 101–132 (2007)
Web page of the School of Industrial Engineering of the Universidad Politcnica de Cartagena, Bachelor in Industrial Electronics and Automation Engineering, http://www.etsii.upct.es/giti_en.htm (checked November 2011)
Web page of the Master in Information and Communication Technologies of the Universidad Politcnica de Cartagena (in Spanish), http://www.dte.upct.es/doctorado (checked November 2010)
Iborra, A., Alonso, D., Ortiz, F.J., Franco, J.A., Snchez, P., Álvarez, B.: Design of service robots. IEEE Robotics and Automation Magazine, Special Issue on Software Engineering for Robotics 16(1), 24–33 (2009)
Ortiz, F.J., Alonso, D., Álvarez, B., Pastor, J.A.: A reference control architecture for service robots implemented on a climbing vehicle. In: Vardanega, T., Wellings, A.J. (eds.) Ada-Europe 2005. LNCS, vol. 3555, pp. 13–24. Springer, Heidelberg (2005)
Pioneer 3 operations manual web page, http://robots.mobilerobots.com/docs/alldocs/P3OpMan6.pdf (checked November 2010)
Web page of the MobileRobots/ActivMedia MobileSim simulator, http://robots.mobilerobots.com/wiki/MobileSim (checked November 2010)
Chil, R.: Desarrollo de un protocolo de comunicacin en tiempo real, usando el lenguaje Ada, para comunicarse con el robot Pioner P3–AT, Master Thesis (in Spanish), Universidad Politcnica de Cartagena (2010)
Web page of the MobileRobots company, http://www.mobilerobots.com (checked November 2010)
Mohamed, N., Al-Jaroodi, J., Jawhar, I.: Middleware for Robotics: A Survey. In: Proceedings of the 2008 IEEE Conference on Robotics, Automation and Mechatronics, Chengdu, China, pp. 736–742 (September 2008)
Web page of the Robot Standards and Reference Architectures (RoSTa), Coordination Action funded under EU’s FP6, http://wiki.robot-standards.org/index.php/Current_Middleware_Approaches_and_Paradigms
Fayad, M., Schmidt, D.: Object-Oriented Application Frameworks. Special Issue on Object-Oriented Application Frameworks, Comm. of the ACM 40(10), 32–38 (1997)
Mosteo, A., Montano, L.: SANCTA: an Ada 2005 general-purpose architecture for mobile robotics research. In: Abdennahder, N., Kordon, F. (eds.) Ada-Europe 2007. LNCS, vol. 4498, pp. 221–234. Springer, Heidelberg (2007)
Murphy, R.: Introduction to AI robotics. The MIT press, Cambridge (2000) ISBN 0-262-13383-0
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2011 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
About this paper
Cite this paper
Chil, R., Alonso, D., Ortiz, F., Pastor, J. (2011). Using Robotics as a Motivational Tool: An Ada Interface to a Pioneer Robot. In: Romanovsky, A., Vardanega, T. (eds) Reliable Software Technologies - Ada-Europe 2011. Ada-Europe 2011. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 6652. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-21338-0_11
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-21338-0_11
Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg
Print ISBN: 978-3-642-21337-3
Online ISBN: 978-3-642-21338-0
eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)