Smart, secure and sustainable robotic hand

Robotic manipulators have a wide range of applications in many sectors from automation to medical surgery. Since decades, researchers and developers have been proposing creative designs in leveraging specific applications or to demonstrate proof of concepts in bespoke scenarios. This paper presents a novel smart, secure and sustainable framework for the design of a 3D printed robotic hand. The smart robotic hand, consisting of two elements: i) a user-wearable glove and ii) a mechanical hand, is a seamless entity in which the movement of the mechanical hand is controlled by the user-wearable glove. A real-time communication between the glove (server) and the mechanical hand (client) is facilitated through a secure wireless client-server model running on a commercially available microcontroller making it light-weight and cost-effective. In order to promote sustainable 3D printing, a conscious decision was taken to use recyclable and biodegradable Polylactic acid (PLA) based wood filament for the casing of the mechanical hand as well a cotton and linen based material for the user glove

Exploring the Learning Gains of Implementing Teacher Humanoid Robots in STEM Education: A Systematic Review

Εducational (or pedagogical) robotics has received increased attention over the last few years based on its effectiveness on the learning process. Humanoid robots have been recently introduced in school settings to mainly support teaching of curriculum-based subjects. However, humanoid robots’ benefits on STEM education in typical classroom settings are less examined by the research literature. Instead, most research studies take place in non-typical school or classroom settings (such as laboratories). The main goal of the current review is to sum up results of relevant research studies about the positive impact of teacher humanoid robots on STEM education. The learning benefits in STEM subjects, programming and reasoning skills are examined too. Sample subject of this review are mainstream students aged 4 to 18 years old and research studies are grouped based on their commonalities such as common learning areas and results

Robótica blanda: Mano protésica biomimética

En el campo de las prótesis se ha abierto una nueva rama de investigación que trata de emplear las técnicas y materiales propios de la robótica blanda. Éstos han demostrado tener potencial, entre otras aplicaciones, para el uso en el contacto físico entre hombre-robot como dispositivos de rehabilitación debido a las prestaciones que ofrecen como liviandad, baja dureza, contacto autoadaptativo, buena relación peso-potencia y bajo costo. El objetivo entonces es diseñar, construir y determinar la destreza de una prótesis biomimética de mano utilizando técnicas y materiales comunes dentro de la robótica blanda