A Review of Robotics Kits for Tertiary Education

The purpose of this paper is to present a survey of the currently available kits for tertiary education in robotics. Our selection criteria are (i) modularity (ii) re-usability (iii) versatility and (iv) affordability. We focus on toolkits that allow ease of re-use to teach in different curricula (such as electronics, programming, or human-robot interaction). We also considered the interoperability with libraries and open-source frameworks. Finally, we present an overview of our contribution in the form of a robotic manipulator built with LEGO Mindstorm NXT and its integration with Matlab and the ROS robotic framework.

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