Easily-programmable corobots for student use

As mobile robots become more prevalent in our society, there are numerous potential applications for them. However, current educational opportunities tend to focus on the robotics aspects rather than higher-level applications. In this project, we are developing a system that takes care of the robotics aspects and provides a fully-capable yet fully programmable platform to allow students with interests in areas outside robotics can learn the traditional computing concepts within the robot context. These interactive robots, or “corobots”, will operate within the department alongside people while performing tasks as programmed by the students. Here we present the overall system architecture, in which we solve fairly traditional problems but in a robust way that will allow for general use, and a student API which can control the robots at a high level while integrated with arbitrary other code.