EUROPA — A ROS-based Open Platform for Educational Robotics

Introducing robotics to young students is becoming very important for modern education of all levels. This paper presents EUROPA, an educational robot, which was developed as a handy, low-cost and extensible platform of high capabilities, suitable to bring robotics to secondary school students and beyond. It is designed as a system of easily accessible hardware and open software that can be incorporated in STEM classes of all levels in the Greek education system. The proposed robot incorporates Robot Operating System (ROS) and is based on Python which is already taught in Greek modula on informatics, similarly to other countries worldwide. We present in detail the hardware and software architecture of our robot and define its advantages among similar state-of-the-art educational robots. EUROPA platform was introduced to a class of secondary school students with robotic experience in Lego Mindstorms, and was assessed with very positive results.