B.EN.DE.R. 2.0: Basic ENvironment for DEveloping Robotic software: Application to educational purposes

A robotic software environment tested in the real autonomous mini-vehicle BENDER 2.0, designed for educational purposes, is presented in this paper. Future Computer Science engineers have used this framework to learn Concurrent Programming techniques on a real system. The successful results obtained show the significance of using real environments in practicals, in order to acquire the necessary abilities in the field of computing. Both the mechanical assembly of the mini-robot and the development of software components have been carried out taking into account its educational purpose. In order to implement concurrent programs, the YARP middleware library has been used together with POSIX threads, mutex objects and condition variables, in a Linux-based environment.