Development of a desktop robot for robotics education

The lack of easily constructible, programmable, and extendable robotics environments is a big obstacle that prevents educational robotics from growing faster. Most of the time, students need to deal with hardware interfacing and integration, low-level programming for hardware control, and software integration. This usually causes the loss of students' valuable time that they could spend on designing and implementing their own algorithms. This fact led us to seek ways of developing a hardware/software environment through which students can start developing their algorithms quickly and spend less time on the hardware and software details of the robot in use. This environment lets students integrate a variety of sensors and/or actuators to the robot in no time without having to know the details of their low-level hardware interfacing. It also helps students develop software components that can be easily integrated with other software components and distributed across computers.