ROS-based online robot programming for remote education and training

RPN (Robotic Programming Network) is an initiative to bring existing remote robot laboratories to a new dimension, by adding the flexibility and power of writing ROS code in an Internet browser and running it in the remote robot with a single click. The code is executed in the robot server at full speed, i.e. without any communication delay, and the output of the process is returned back. Built upon Robot Web Tools, RPN works out-of-the-box in any ROS-based robot or simulator. This paper presents the core functionality of RPN in the context of a web-enabled ROS system, its possibilities for remote education and training, and some experimentation with simulators and real robots in which we have integrated the tool in a Moodle environment, creating some programming courses and make it open to researchers and students (http://robotprogramming.uji.es).