Two bachelor theses one the use of TurtleBot3 for embedded system education have just been finalized. The first thesis by Mirka Schoute is entitled “Application Programming for Embedded Systems in Education on TurtleBot3 using Statecharts” and investigates whether an existing lab project based on Lego Mindstorm EV3 and Stateflow can be replaced by a similar lab project using TurtleBot3 and Yakindu Statechart Tools. It compares the robot platform and the statechart tools in terms of features, and redesigns the lab project to contain the same educational challenges. The main conclusion is that the redesigned project based on TurtleBot3 and Yakindu Statechart Tools are a suitable replacement for old project and provides better opportunities for further development on the project going forward. Based on the results of this thesis, we have decided to change the robot and tooling for the lab project in the academic year 2020/2021. We are happy to announce that Mirka continues working with us over summer to further extend his work and prepare it for student consumption.
The second thesis is written by Louis van Zutphen and is entitled “Gazebo Simulation Fidelity for the Turtlebot3 Burger“. This work studies how well simulation of TurtleBot3 in the simulation environment Gazebo captures the real behavior of the robot. Tests of sensors and actuators are created both in simulation and reality and results are compared. The conclusion is that code developed and tested with Gazebo is easy to deploy on the TurtleBot, but that there are numerous differences between the real robot and environment and their corresponding models in Gazebo that affect the fidelity. Most of these differences can be managed as long as the programmer is aware of them, allowing the amount of time required with the physical robot to be greatly reduced. This work has convinced us that we do not need to buy a TurtleBot for each group of students, but that we can significantly reduce the cost of the lab by efficiently sharing them.