Advancing Engineering Education with Virtual Labs

[MUSIC PLAYING]

I have been building this thing called the ROBOTARIUM at Georgia Tech. And I did not set out to build an educational lab. I actually built a remotely-accessible research lab, but then it turned out that it resonated with an educational agenda.

This thing went live in August 2017. Since then we've run over 5,000 remote experiments. First of all, we have a simulator. And you write the code there, and the code runs MATLAB. Once it works in the simulator, you submit. It gets placed in a queue and then executed on the actual robots. And you get the data and the video feeds or whatever other things you're interested in.

The robots are always sitting at the edge of the arena basically charging using wireless chargers. And then when they're recruited, they go out and they perform experiments and then they go back. So you specify things like how many robots, what kind of dynamics, what sensor suites. And then the core of the programs is really the control strategy. So that's what we're focusing in on.

We set out to democratize access. And robotics research has to a large degree, become a resource competition rather than a good ideas competition. As a scientist, I want the people with the best ideas to be able to test what they have on real platforms.