Work in progress - an integrated programming environment suitable for distance learning

Abstract

Autonomous robots are used as a vehicle to learn programming in C and Java, to design neural network controllers, to experiment with finite state machines and to explore operating system concepts. Our environment is deployed as (i) physical robots, (ii) multi-robot simulation written as a Java application, (iii) distributed multi-robot simulation using client-server architecture running on the Web. This paper details the design rationale, implementation, deployment and reports evaluation of the work to date. The software is freely available from the author at c.price@worc.ac.uk.