Design Of Software For Educational Robotics Based On Virtual Machine

Robotics is the integration of many kinds of high-tech, involving many of cutting-edge areas of science and technology. With the rapid development of robotic, the robot platform for the education has aroused great attention at home and abroad. Education method based on robotics not only can stimulate the students'interest in high technology, but also can train the students in creative thinking, develop the students'practical ability, especially in computer programming ability.With the development of the robotic education, the research on basic development platform of educational robot is also booming. A lot of related products appear at home and abroad. Penguin Robot Platform developed by Intelligent Robot Research Laboratory is robotics platform for the primary and secondary education. It is served as experiment platform in Robot Laboratory in Science and Technology Museum. The experiment must be completed in 2-3 hours. What is more challenge is that the experimenter can be the primary students, secondary school students and even college students. So the special demands make the development of robotics platform challenging.According to the objective and characteristics of the robotics education activities, this paper provides a software system for robotics education platform. Software system is divided into three parts: the graphical programming software, the robot simulation software and robot control software. The key techniques include: using virtual machine technology to build a robot virtual machine, designing the corresponding machine instructions; designing the graphical robot program instructions, using GuiToolkit ( an open source graphics toolkit) to build friendly human-computer interface, using Open Dynamics Engine (an open source physics engine, ODE) for the virtual robot simulation and using the OpenGL to render 3D scene.Using virtual robot software platform can improve the efficiency of students debugger, and reduce the physical damage to the robot dued to wrong programs. Because of uneven levels of experimenter, this technology is particularly important. The introduction of virtual machine technology in the platform has lots of advantages: uncoupling the graphical programming language and robot simulation dependence on the control chip; reducing the difficulty of the user to debug robot programs and reducing the times of writing flash. Software platform in the actual operation in Laboratory of Science and Technology Museum shows that the software System is effective, and achieves the desired objectives.