IoT and Robotics Problem Solving in Visual Programming

Laboratory Manual

http://neptune.fulton.ad.asu.edu/VIPLE/.

Yinong Chen and Gennaro De Luca School of Computing, Informatics, and Decision Systems Engineering Arizona State University

Microsoft VPL is a milestone in software engineering and robotics from many aspects. It is service- oriented; it is workflow-based; it is event-driven; it supports parallel computing; and it is a great educational tool that is simple to learn and yet powerful and expressive.

Sponsored by two Innovation Excellence awards from Microsoft Research in 2003 and in 2005, Dr. Yinong Chen participated in the earlier discussion of service-oriented robotics at Microsoft. Microsoft VPL was immediately adopted by Chen in developing the freshman course CSE101 in 2006. The course grew from 70 students in 2006 to over 350 students in 2011. The course was extended to all students in Ira A. Fulton Schools of Engineering at ASU and was renamed FSE100, which is offered to thousands of freshman engineering students now.

Unfortunately, Microsoft stopped developing and supporting VPL recently, which lead to our FSE100 course, and many other schools’ courses using VPL, without further support. Particularly, the current version of VPL does not support LEGO’s third generation of EV3 robot, while the second generation NXT is out of the market.

To keep our course running and also help the other schools, we take the challenge and responsibility to develop our own visual programming environment, ASU VIPLE, based on the IoT and Robot as a Service concept. The purpose of this project is to provide a free environment supporting the VPL development community in education and research. To serve this purpose, ASU VIPLE keeps the great features that VPL has and provides a similar user interface and functionality, so that the MSRDS and VPL development community can use ASU VIPLE with no learning curve. ASU VIPLE does not replace Microsoft VPL. Instead, it extends VPL in its capacity to connect to different physical robots, including EV3 and Intel- based open architecture robots.

Robot as a Service and the ASU VIPLE environment are designed and developed by Yinong Chen and Gennaro De Luca, with contributions from Calvin Cheng, Megan Plachecki, and Sami Mian. ASU VIPLE documents, software, and sample code can be downloaded from the ASU Web Service and Application repository. The direct link is http://neptune.fulton.ad.asu.edu/VIPLE/