Integrating ROS into Educational Robotics: Bridging the Gap between Grade School and Grad School

Robots and robot competitions have been used throughout the entire STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math) education pipeline [8]. However, a gap has been identified in the focus and reinforcement of educational robotics concepts between K-12 and higher education [3]; for example, K-12 robot competitions tend to focus more on open-loop, reactive, and/or rule-based solutions with limited sensing and processing, while university-level robot competitions tend of focus more on closed-loop, deliberative, and/or inference-based solutions with advanced sensing and processing. ROS (Robot Operating System) [7] is an open-source robotics software framework that has resulted in reusable software packages [9] developed and shared by a community of robotics researchers, professionals, and hobbyists [15]. Making such advanced tools and technologies accessible to K-12 students could help bridge the education gap between K-12 and university robotics and promote more artificially intelligent (AI) solutions.