Overview of technologies for building robots in the classroom

This paper aims to give an overview of technologies that can be used to implement robotics within an educational context. We discuss complete robotics systems as well as projects that implement only certain elements of a robotics system, such as electronics, hardware, or software. We believe that Maker Movement and DIY trends offers many new opportunities for teaching and feel that they will become much more prominent in the future. Products and projects discussed in this paper are: Mindstorms, Vex, Arduino, Dwengo, Raspberry Pi, MakeBlock, OpenBeam, BitBeam, Scratch, Blockly and ArduBlock

Using Scratch to Teach Undergraduate Students' Skills on Artificial Intelligence

This paper presents a educational workshop in Scratch that is proposed for the active participation of undergraduate students in contexts of Artificial Intelligence. The main objective of the activity is to demystify the complexity of Artificial Intelligence and its algorithms. For this purpose, students must realize simple exercises of clustering and two neural networks, in Scratch. The detailed methodology to get that is presented in the article.Comment: 6 pages, 7 figures, workshop presentatio

Multiple configuration shell-core structured robotic manipulator with interchangeable mechatronic joints : a thesis presented in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Masters of Engineering in Mechatronics at Massey University, Turitea Campus, Palmerston North, New Zealand

With the increase of robotic technology utilised throughout industry, the need for skilled labour in this area has increased also. As a result, education dealing with robotics has grown at both the high-school and tertiary educational level. Despite the range of pedagogical robots currently on the market, there seems to be a low variety of these systems specifically related to the types of robotic manipulator arms popular for industrial applications. Furthermore, a fixed-arm system is limited to only serve as an educational supplement for that specific configuration and therefore cannot demonstrate more than one of the numerous industrial-type robotic arms. The Shell-Core structured robotic manipulator concept has been proposed to improve the quality and variety of available pedagogical robotic arm systems on the market. This is achieved by the reconfigurable nature of the concept, which incorporates shell and core structural units to make the construction of at least 5 mainstream industrial arms possible. The platform will be suitable, but not limited to use within the educational robotics industry at high-school and higher educational levels and may appeal to hobbyists. Later dubbed SMILE (Smart Manipulator with Interchangeable Links and Effectors), the system utilises core units to provide either rotational or linear actuation in a single plane. A variety of shell units are then implemented as the body of the robotic arm, serving as appropriate offsets to achieve the required configuration. A prototype consisting of a limited number of ‘building blocks’ was developed for proof-of-concept, found capable of achieving several of the proposed configurations. The outcome of this research is encouraging, with a Massey patent search confirming the unique features of the proposed concept. The prototype system is an economic, easy to implement, plug and play, and multiple-configuration robotic manipulator, suitable for various applications

Enhancing Practice and Achievement in Introductory Programming With a Robot Olympics

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User interface and function library for ground robot navigation

Master's Project (M.S.) University of Alaska Fairbanks, 2017A web application user interface and function library were developed to enable a user to program a ground robot to navigate autonomously. The user interface includes modules for generating a grid of obstacles from a map image, setting waypoints for a path through the map, and programming a robot in a code editor to navigate autonomously. The algorithm used for navigation is an A* algorithm modified with obstacle padding to accommodate the width of the robot and path smoothing to simplify the paths. The user interface and functions were designed to be simple so that users without technical backgrounds can use them, and by doing so they can engage in the development process of human-centered robots. The navigation functions were successful in finding paths in test configurations, and the performance of the algorithms was fast enough for user interactivity up to a certain limit of grid cell sizes