New Perspectives in Science Education

The interdisciplinary science and engineering projects attract the students from different disciplines and backgrounds. In initiating the project titled “Distributed Robotic System over Controller Area Network” at East Stroudsburg University, the students from different disciplines and backgrounds: computer science, physics, mathematics, and others have joined the team, mostly undergraduate students. Most students in the team tend to show their deep interest in these areas when they joined the project. The students are organized into two groups upon their interests and capability of what they like to do for the project, after having open discussions in many a time on what they might be able to do for making the multiple robots work over Controller Area Network.

In this project the team was faced with several unexpected hindrance in achieving a desired performance when the robots on the shared bus send and receive messages between them and robot controllers. In order to resolve the problems that we ran into, we need to know whether the bus access type, bandwidth, control option, timing, and others are suitable enough to the robots working in synchronous or asynchronous way. Lastly, the team should develop and test that concurrency resolving programs are good enough to tackle the critical section problem, say synchronization, when the robots on the network to acquire the same resources simultaneously, mostly the Controller Area Network bus.

The sysnchronization is very well known problem in computer science, which is appeared in many real-world applications that need to share resouces, and  it is not easy for the students to develop the proper programs. The problems that the students tackled with during the research project, especially the synchronization, arose the need for looking into teaching the synchroniztion problem in more pratical and accepable way to the student learning. The practial situation of distributed robotics over Controller Area Networks has been remapped to the easy-to-understand synchronization problem of Queen and Messengers, in which the messengers are cosidered as robots while the queen is considered as a host computer. The Controller Area Network bus is arranged as the queen’s antechamber where only one messeenger is allowed to render the message to the queen. The students in the operating systems classroom were very clearly to understand the synchronization problem, and develop the Queen and Messengers program well since this problem has been seen in many a time in movies, games and other areas.