Automatic Competitions in the Unibotics Open Online Robot Programming Web

This paper presents a gamification extension for the Unibotics educational robotics web platform, which provides the ability to organize online international competitions about robot programming. Unibotics includes several robotics challenges, the robots may be programmed in Python from the browser. It is ROS-based, cross-platform and uses Gazebo robotics simulator. The competition process has been fully automated creating an auxiliary user, named CeremonyMaster, which may load and run the submitted code from all the participants, and evaluate them providing a score depending on their performances when solving the challenge. At the same time the live results can be seen at a dynamic web page and the whole unfolding of the tournament is broadcasted through Twitch. The underlying goal of this extension is to increase the motivation and learning engagement of university students in computer science or robotics engineering areas. The extension has been experimentally validated with a first competition and more than 50 university students. The proposed challenge was to program a Formula 1 car, endowed with a camera, to follow a red line along a race circuit, the faster the better.