ros4mat: A Matlab Programming Interface for Remote Operations of ROS-Based Robotic Devices in an Educational Context

More and more, robotics is perceived in education as being an excellent way to promote higher quality learning among students, by grounding theoretical concepts into reality. In order to maximize the learning throughput, the focus of any robotics software platform should be on ease of use, with little time spent integrating the components together. To this effect, we introduce ros4mat, an open source library which provides a simple and flexible interface between ROS (Robot Operating System) and Matlab
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. The conception is focused on academic use, and allows a very simple integration of sensors and actuators to existing Matlab code. The library is designed to provide an easy, platform-independent, and fast connection between a robot (running ROS) and multiple clients (running only Matlab). Moreover, it is very versatile and can be used with many common types of sensors in robotics, including low-cost ones. We report the results of ros4mat use in a robotics course to provide more real world experimentation, along with some code samples illustrating the simplicity of our approach.