Building a Flexible Mobile Robotics Teaching Toolkit by Extending MATLAB/Simulink with ROS and Gazebo

To improve the learning efficiency in robotic simulation environments with physical characteristics, this paper presents a toolkit for mobile robotics teaching via extending the MATLAB/Simulink using ROS and Gazebo simulator. The content discusses the proposed software architecture firstly, the access to virtual sensors and actuators has been integrated and the communication details are also hidden to allow the students to focus on programming and debugging their key algorithms. An example showing how to carry out the mobile robotic teaching using the proposed toolkit is also given. After properly creating the robot models under Gazebo, the code developed for the simulation process can be directly implemented in the real robot without modifications. It is proved by the teaching practice that the proposed toolkit can significantly speed up development of robotic solutions and boost the student active learning experience.