Department of Mathematics, Physics and technological sciences, University CEU Cardenal Herrera, C/San Bartolome 55, CP 46115 Alfara del Patriarca (Valencia), Spain.
Department of Mechanical Engineering and Construction, Universitat Jaume I, Avda de Vicent Sos Baynat s/n, CP 12071, Castellon, Spain.
Sensors (Basel). 2021 Feb 2;21(3):1006. doi: 10.3390/s21031006.
Over the last years, mobile robot platforms are having a key role in education worldwide. Among others, LEGO Robots and MATLAB/Simulink are being used mainly in universities to improve the teaching experience. Most LEGO systems used in the literature are based on NXT, as the EV3 version is relatively recent. In contrast to the previous versions, the EV3 allows the development of real-time applications for teaching a wide variety of subjects as well as conducting research experiments. The goal of the research presented in this paper was to develop and validate a novel real-time educational platform based on the MATLAB/Simulink package and the LEGO EV3 brick for academic use in the fields of robotics and computer science. The proposed framework is tested here in different university teaching situations and several case studies are presented in the form of interactive projects developed by students. Without loss of generality, the platform is used for testing different robot path planning algorithms. Classical algorithms like rapidly-exploring random trees or artificial potential fields, developed by robotics researchers, are tested by bachelor students, since the code is freely available on the Internet. Furthermore, recent path planning algorithms developed by the authors are also tested in the platform with the aim of detecting the limits of its applicability. The restrictions and advantages of the proposed platform are discussed in order to enlighten future educational applications.
在过去的几年中，移动机器人平台在全球范围内的教育中发挥着关键作用。其中，LEGO 机器人和 MATLAB/Simulink 主要在大学中被用于改善教学体验。文献中使用的大多数 LEGO 系统都基于 NXT，因为 EV3 版本相对较新。与之前的版本相比，EV3 允许开发实时应用程序，以教授各种主题，并进行研究实验。本文提出的研究旨在开发和验证一种基于 MATLAB/Simulink 包和 LEGO EV3 砖的新型实时教育平台，用于机器人学和计算机科学领域的学术用途。在不同的大学教学环境中对所提出的框架进行了测试，并以学生开发的互动项目的形式呈现了几个案例研究。为了不失一般性，该平台用于测试不同的机器人路径规划算法。机器人研究人员开发的快速探索随机树或人工势场等经典算法由本科生进行测试，因为这些代码在互联网上是免费提供的。此外，还在平台上测试了作者最近开发的路径规划算法，目的是检测其适用性的限制。为了启发未来的教育应用，讨论了所提出的平台的限制和优势。
