2024-06-11 –, Room A
FOSSBot ( https://github.com/eellak/fossbot) is an open source and open-design DIY robot that has been developed by Greek Free and Open Source Software (GFOSS) society and Harokopio University of Athens (HUA) for educational purposes. FOSSBot provides a practical, hands-on platform for educators who wish to experiment with teaching science, technology, engineering, and mathematics concepts (STEM). In the last four years, GFOSS has expanded FOSSBot's functionality through the Google Summer of Code and FOSSBot has been presented in various open source conferences (e.g. FOSDEM 2023) and open access journals.
For users who cannot print and assemble the physical robot, we have developed an online coding environment that allows them to interact directly with a simulation of FOSSBot. Using the same software stack one can write and test any FOSSbot-related code in the simulated environment before running it in the physical robot and this allows to scale up training and expand the FOSSBot community of users.
With this talk, we aim to introduce our newly developed online platform that expands the accessibility to the coding environment of the robot through simulation, making it open and free for everyone. The FOSSbot platform enables everyone to access a development environment with just a few clicks and start developing robotic applications using a block-based IDE (a custom block-based visual editor that builds on Blockly) or a native Python IDE (a custom version of Monaco). The new web-based simulator developed using Godot allows for direct, installation-free use of FOSSBot simulation from the user's browser. Our platform is designed to be lightweight, enabling anyone, including schools with limited or poor internet connections, to self-host it locally and start using it. We have incorporated modern technologies such as PostgreSQL, Docker, React, FastAPI, and many more to provide a modern and user-friendly experience.
Soon the platform will support collaborative scenarios among users and classes. It will also facilitate direct programming with physical devices, including the FOSSbot, Arduino, and microcontrollers supporting MicroPython.
In OW2 we want to share with the community examples and lessons learned through the development process and invite anyone interested to contribute to our project.
Iraklis Varlamis is a Professor at the Department of Informatics and Telematics of HUA in the area of Data Management. He holds a Ph.D. from Athens University of Economics and Business, Greece, and an MSc in Information Systems Engineering from UMIST UK. His research interests range from data mining and social network analytics to recommender systems for social media and real-world applications. He has more than 260 articles published in international journals and conferences and more than 5100 citations on his work. He holds a patent from the Greek Patent Office for a system that thematically groups web documents using content and links. He is the scientific coordinator for HUA in several EU (H2020, ECSEL, REC) projects. He has a leading role in national projects in collaboration with researchers from other HUA departments and other universities.