Resumen de EDURobot: an educational computer simulation program for navigation of mobile robots in the presence of obstacles
R. Abiyev, Dogan Ibrahim, B. Erin
In engineering education different experimental exercises are provided to students in order to improve the teaching level and providebetter understanding of theoretical materials. These exercises might be implemented using educational software tools. In this paper, aneducational software tool called EDURobot has been developed to enhance the understanding of robotics for undergraduate andgraduate students in computer and electrical and electronic engineering departments. The software tool mainly teaches students thenavigation problems of a mobile robot avoiding obstacles in a static environment using different algorithms. The simulation environmentis of a menu-driven variety where students can draw obstacles of standard shapes and sizes and assign the starting point of the mobilerobot. The robot will then navigate among these obstacles without hitting them and reach the goal point given by the user. Parametersassociated with the different algorithms may also be changed to observe their effects which will further enable comprehension ofcharacteristics of different path planning algorithms. The program is developed in Visual C# for Windows platforms. Differentalgorithms employed in the software are potential field, vector field histogram plus and local navigation.
