Teaching Continuity in Robotics Labs in the Age of Covid and Beyond

This paper argues that training of future Roboticists and Robotics Engineers in Computer Science departments, requires the extensive direct work with real robots, and that this educational mission will be negatively impacted when access to robotics learning laboratories is curtailed. This is exactly the problem that Robotics Labs encountered in early 2020, at the start of the Covid pandemic. The paper then turns to the description of a remote/virtual robotics teaching laboratory and examines in detail what that would mean, what the benefits would be, and how it may be used. Part of this vision was implemented at our institution during 2020 and has been in constant use since then. The specific architecture and implementation, as far as it has been built, is described. The exciting insight in the conclusion is that the work that was encouraged and triggered by a pandemic seems to have very positive longer-term benefits of increasing access to robotics education, increasing the ability of any one institution to scale their robotics education greatly, and potentially do this while reducing costs.

Situated Multimodal Control of a Mobile Robot: Navigation through a Virtual Environment

We present a new interface for controlling a navigation robot in novel environments using coordinated gesture and language. We use a TurtleBot3 robot with a LIDAR and a camera, an embodied simulation of what the robot has encountered while exploring, and a cross-platform bridge facilitating generic communication. A human partner can deliver instructions to the robot using spoken English and gestures relative to the simulated environment, to guide the robot through navigation tasks.