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1. FORE: A Student-Centered Framework for Accessible Robotics Education through Simulation and Interactive Learning

   Jamali, H; Debolt, A; Dalton, H; Layosa, J; Macy, I; Shill, P; Feil-Seifer, D; Harris, F; Dascalu, S; Wu, R (June 2025, 2025 ASEE Conference)

   Robotics education is often constrained by the high cost and limited accessibility of physical robots, which can hinder the learning experience for many students. To address this challenge, the Fundamentals of Robotics Education (FORE) project, part of a larger NSF-funded collaborative work, was developed to create an accessible and comprehensive online learning platform. FORE provides a student-centered approach to robotics education, featuring a robust code editor, real-time simulation, and interactive lessons. This paper presents the architecture and implementation of the FORE platform, highlighting its key components, including the backend simulation using Gazebo and ROS2, a frontend visualizer built with Three.js, and the integration of a Python-based coding environment. We discuss the development process, the contributions of the student team, and the challenges encountered during the project. The results demonstrate the platform’s effectiveness in making robotics education more easily available. These findings originate from software testing and utilization by senior computer science students, as well as feedback from participants at the University of Nevada, Reno College of Engineering’s annual Capstone Course Innovation Day. The platform allows students to gain hands-on experience without the need for physical hardware. Its adaptability enables it to serve a broad audience of undergraduate students, offering an encompassing and accessible solution for modern robotics education. 

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2. Speech-Guided Sequential Planning for Autonomous Navigation Using Large Language Model Meta AI 3 (Llama3)

   https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-96-3519-1_15  

   Srivastava, Alkesh K; Dames, Philip (March 2025, Springer Nature Singapore)

   In social robotics, a pivotal focus is enabling robots to engage with humans in a more natural and seamless manner. The emergence of advanced large language models (LLMs) has driven significant advancements in integrating natural language understanding capabilities into social robots. This paper presents a system for speech-guided sequential planning in pick and place tasks, which are found across a range of application areas. The proposed system uses Large Language Model Meta AI (Llama3) to interpret voice commands by extracting essential details through parsing and decoding the commands into sequential actions. These actions are sent to DRL-VO, a learning-based control policy built on the Robot Operating System (ROS) that allows a robot to autonomously navigate through social spaces with static infrastructure and crowds of people. We demonstrate the effectiveness of the system in simulation experiment using Turtlebot 2 in ROS1 and Turtlebot 3 in ROS2. We conduct hardware trials using a Clearpath Robotics Jackal UGV, highlighting its potential for real-world deployment in scenarios requiring flexible and interactive robotic behaviors. 

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3. Reflections of Undergraduate Engineering Students Completing a Cross-Disciplinary Robotics Project with Pre-Service Teachers and Fifth Graders in an Electromechanical Systems Course.

   Kaipa, K; Kidd, J; Kumi, I; Ringleb, S; Ayala, O; Gutierrez, K; Pazos, P; Cima, F; Rhemer, D (June 2024, ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition)

   Engineering is becoming increasingly cross-disciplinary, requiring students to develop skills in multiple engineering disciplines (e.g., mechanical engineering students having to learn the basics of electronics, instrumentation, and coding) and interprofessional skills to integrate perspectives from people outside their field. In the workplace, engineering teams are frequently multidisciplinary, and often, people from outside of engineering are part of the team that brings a product to market. Additionally, teams are often diverse in age, race, gender, and in other areas. Teams that creatively utilize the contrasting perspectives and ideas arising from these differences can positively affect team performance and generate solutions effective for a broader range of users. These trends suggest that engineering education can benefit from having engineering students work on team projects that involve a blend of cross-disciplinary and mixed-aged collaborations. An NSF-funded project set out to explore this idea by partnering undergraduate engineering students enrolled in a 300-level electromechanical systems course with preservice teachers enrolled in a 400-level educational technology course to plan and deliver robotics lessons to fifth graders at a local school. Working in small teams, students designed, built, and coded bio-inspired robots. The collaborative activities included: (1) training with Hummingbird Bit hardware (Birdbrain Technologies, Pittsburgh, PA) (e.g. sensors, servo motors) and coding platform, (2) preparing robotics lessons for fifth graders that explained the engineering design process, and (3) guiding the fifth graders in the design of their robots. Additionally, each engineering student designed a robot following the theme developed with their education student and fifth-grade partners. 

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4. ROSCallBaX: Statically Detecting Inconsistencies in Callback Function Setup of Robotic Systems

   https://doi.org/10.1145/3715748  

   Kate, Sayali; Gao, Yifei; Feng, Shiwei; Zhang, Xiangyu (June 2025, Proceedings of the ACM on Software Engineering)

   Increasingly popular Robot Operating System (ROS) framework allows building robotic systems by integrating newly developed and/or reused modules, where the modules can use different versions of the framework (e.g., ROS1 or ROS2) and programming language (e.g. C++ or Python). The majority of such robotic systems' work happens in callbacks. The framework provides various elements for initializing callbacks and for setting up the execution of callbacks. It is the responsibility of developers to compose callbacks and their execution setup elements, and hence can lead to inconsistencies related to the setup of callback execution due to developer's incomplete knowledge of the semantics of elements in various versions of the framework. Some of these inconsistencies do not throw errors at runtime, making their detection difficult for developers. We propose a static approach to detecting such inconsistencies by extracting a static view of the composition of robotic system's callbacks and their execution setup, and then checking it against the composition conventions based on the elements' semantics. We evaluate our ROSCallBaX prototype on the dataset created from the posts on developer forums and ROS projects that are publicly available. The evaluation results show that our approach can detect real inconsistencies. 

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5. HOPPY: An Open-source Kit for Education with Dynamic Legged Robots

   Ramos, Joao; Ding, Yanran; Sim, Young-woo; Murphy, Kevin; Block, Daniel (January 2021, IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems)

   null (Ed.)

   This paper introduces HOPPY, an open-source, low-cost, robust, and modular kit for robotics education. The robot dynamically hops around a rotating gantry with a fixed base. The kit is intended to lower the entry barrier for studying dynamic robots and legged locomotion with real systems. It bridges the theoretical content of fundamental robotic courses with real dynamic robots by facilitating and guiding the software and hardware integration. This paper describes the topics which can be studied using the kit, lists its components, discusses preferred practices for implementation, presents results from experiments with the simulator and the real system, and suggests further improvements. A simple heuristic-based controller is described to achieve velocities up to 1.7m/s, navigate small objects, and mitigate external disturbances when the robot is aided by a counterweight. HOPPY was utilized as the subject of a semester-long project for the Robot Dynamics and Control course at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. The positive feedback from the students and instructors about the hands-on activities during the course motivates us to share this kit and continue improving it in the future. 

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