From Theory to Practice: an Educational Framework to Provide Students Real-world Robotics Experience

At the 2025 IFToMM-DACH held in FH-Kärnten, Villach on the February 20-21, 2025, members of the BIROMED-Lab at the University of Basel presented an educational platform to enable students to gain experience with real-world robotic hardware used in robotics research.

The platform leverages a simulated environment and a dedicated code structure that enables students to work independently in simulation and seamlessly transition into the real-world setup. In this way, the platform seeks to facilitate the shared use of hardware between students and researchers.

The platform was used for a group project in the Medical Robotics course of the Joint Degree Master in Biomedical Engineering of the University of Basel and the University of Applied Sciences and Arts Northwestern Switzerland (FHNW). The successful completion of the project by the students, with only 8 hours of access to the hardware throughout the semester, demonstrated the feasibility of the project to train the next generation of medical roboticists.

The code for the simulator of the platform is already available on GitHub. More details on the implementation of the platform and the teaching framework can be found in the conference abstract.

E-mail: ruben.martinrodriguez@unibas.ch
Website: https://biromed.dbe.unibas.ch