CloudSim-Ed: A robotics MOOC prototype

CloudSim-Ed from OSRF.

During her Gnome Outreach Program for Women internship with OSRF, Ana Marian Pedro worked on CloudSim-Ed a prototype for a massive open online robotics course built with Google CourseBuilder. The course offers simulation tasks and challenges created with CloudSim, Gazebo and ROS.

To enroll in a course, a student must have a Google account and basic CloudSim credentials. CloudSim simulators are controlled from a custom module in CourseBuilder to launch simulation challenges and retrieve the score. When a challenge is launched, the Gazebo simulation world is viewed through a web interface, while an IPython notebook provides the means to interact with the simulated robot using ROS commands.

This project intends to provide students with a means to learn robotics using open source software. For schools with limited robotics laboratory space and equipment, the simulated worlds and environments give students a chance to experiment with minimal setup time and effort. This will hopefully reduce the time used in software troubleshooting when dealing with actual robot hardware.

References:
http://www.ros.org
http://www.gazebosim.org
http://cloudsim.io
https://code.google.com/p/course-builder/

Repositories:
https://bitbucket.org/ammpedro/cloudsim-ed-actuation
https://bitbucket.org/ammpedro/cloudsim-ed-web
https://sunlit-vortex-449.appspot.com/course

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Open Source Robotics Foundation supports the development, distribution, and adoption of open source software for use in robotics research, education, and product development.

Open Source Robotics Foundation supports the development, distribution, and adoption of open source software for use in robotics research, education, and product development.