Robohub focus on Robotics Education – Robohub

Classroom robotics: Training teachers to code

Amanda Jaakkola — Wed, 22 Mar 2017 14:00:11 +0000

*All images credit: ROBBO

30 teachers arrived, excited to learn. They rolled up their sleeves and placed laptops and Robot kits on the floor. The room filled with excitement (and laughter!) as everyone tried to come up with different solutions on how to create different programs. The results were hilarious; a robot inspired by Darth Vader, a robot that asked everyone to turn the lights off when it was too bright in the room, and a robot that tricked the teacher to leave the classroom during an exam.

Not bad for a day of “work!”

Training, like above, is what we’re all about at ROBBO. ROBBO is a fun and simple way for absolutely anyone to get introduced to the world of robotics and coding. As a part of one of our many projects, we organized a training weekend for the single purpose of introducing teachers to programming and robotics. The teachers started with simple exercises in RobboScratch, a visual programming environment; moving the character, creating series of multiple commands, and learning the advantages of the infinite loop when making programs.

So, what do we mean about classroom robotics? Our educational robotics consist of two different robots; the Robot kit and the Lab. Both robots are ideal for learning programming, robotics as well as skills in problem-solving, mathematics and physics while working in interactive teams. The Lab includes a microphone, LED-lights, light sensor and a slider and is great for experimenting with different elements such as sound or light and numeric values. Our other robot is the Robot kit, equipped with a motor, which is a fun way to explore everyday technology using a touch sensor, proximity sensor, light sensor, line sensors and an LED-light. Our robots are programmed in the visual programming environment RobboScratch, an adapted version of Scratch developed at MIT.

In our earlier example, teachers were divided into separate workshops, working in pairs, or teams of three. We believe it is important to communicate and discuss with others to better understand different programs and come up with alternative solutions if the program doesn’t work in the desired way. The workshops are all based on the exercises from our pedagogical guide, and teachers were given a copy of the guide for their own use. Our guide provides instructions and multiple exercise card (with solutions!) and is free to download here (http://robbo.world/support/).

Our teaching guide is for anyone who wants to learn the basics of programming with the help of ROBBO robotics and RobboScratch. Our pedagogical guide is a comprehensive educational tool with instructions, exercise cards and ideas for creating the ultimate learning experience. It has been developed together with Innokas Network at the University of Helsinki and Finnish teachers and students. The majority of the teachers that participated in the training had only limited knowledge of Scratch or Scratch Junior and, therefore, we started from the beginning.

The pedagogical guide includes an introduction to RobboScratch, Lab and Robot kit as well as up to 28 exercise cards to help you along the way. The exercises are designed to develop necessary programming skills step by step, teaching children to think logically as a software developer would do, which may also be useful in many everyday situations. These are, in particular, the ability to understand the whole, to split a problem into smaller parts, and to develop a simple program to perform an operation. In the initial exercises, students will make a program using a predefined model, but as the practice progresses, they will have more and more space for their own ideas.

By developing new skills, users are encouraged to plan and develop innovations in robotics. The training goal is to learn understand and use technology to invent something new. As the final assignment of the teachers’ training, we asked teachers to form teams of four and come up with a small prank using the different capabilities and sensors of either Robot kit or Lab or simultaneous use of both robots.

If you’d like to to learn more about ROBBO or download our free guide, visit our website: http://robbo.world/support/

Comments from teachers:

“The teaching guide is a great support when learning coding. And I can just hand out these ready-made exercise cards to my students as well!”

“The exercise in the guide are good for understanding the different possibilities you have with the robots, because when you start doing an exercise you come up with more ideas on how to develop a more complicated program.”

“The robots emphasized practicality in the learning process. In addition to programming, ROBBO teaches environmental studies and all-around useful skills, in particular when the exercises of the pedagogical guide are being utilized.”

If you’d like to learn more about classroom robotics, check out these articles:

See all the latest robotics news on Robohub, or sign up for our weekly newsletter.

‘It’s a reminder we are making a difference in the world’: Girls of Steel follow up

Theresa Richards — Wed, 14 Dec 2016 13:15:26 +0000

Photo: 2016-2017 Girls of Steel Robotics students in grades 8 to 12.

The Girls of Steel – a competitive FIRST team in Pittsburg, PA – is on a mission to engage more young women into engineering. Over the last few years, we’ve heard what it’s like to be part of an all-girls robotics team and spoke with team’s mentors. Now, we’re following up with the team to talk about their successes and developments since being listed in our 25 Women in Robotics list.

What has changed for Girls of Steel in the last two years?

On the technical side, we created a new subteam called the design subteam. After a team brainstorming session, the team decides on the tasks they want the robot to do. Then design subteam uses suggestions of all the tasks and designs and CADs (using Solidworks) a robot to fit all of their designed requirements. The addition of this subteam has made the team more organized and sped up the building process due to increased accuracy.

Photo: Outreach at the 2016 Pittsburgh Maker Faire.

Girls of Steel changed their mission statement and to make it clearer and less vague. The new mission statement is, “To empower women and girls in the pursuit of STEM by exemplifying female success in robotics”. Our team goals also changed within the last two years. The 2016-2017 goals are:

Talk to 5,000+ people face to face – to inspire people, especially young girls, about STEM.
Have our robot score as many autonomous points as possible during competitions.
Make sure every girl knows her contribution to the team and the robot.

What are some of your latest accomplishments and achievements?

The team has won multiple awards yearly at regional competitions, which includes:

the Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers Entrepreneurship award (2014, 2015, 2016), which celebrates the entrepreneurial spirit by recognizing a team that has developed the framework for a comprehensive business plan to scope, manage, and achieve team objectives,
the Engineering Inspiration award (2014, 2016), which celebrates outstanding success in advancing respect and appreciation for engineering within a team’s school and community,
the 2015 Regional Chairman’s Award at the Buckeye Regional, the most prestigious award at FIRST, it honors the team that best represents a model for other teams to emulate and best embodies the purpose and goals of FIRST,
and the Comcast NBCUniversal Media and Technology Innovation Award that recognizes the team that develops and implements the most outstanding digital experience, marketing strategy, and rationale for digital channels to disseminate content to its audience and further the FIRST mission.

2016 Engineering Inspiration Award at Queen City Regional, Cincinnati, OH

In addition, the team was recognized in 2016 by the North Hills Pittsburgh Branch of the American Association of University Women (AAUW) with the Gateway to Equity Award.

We participated at the first White House Frontiers Conference in Pittsburgh with our “Inspiring Girls Through Robotics” exhibit where we demoed our Chassis Project activity, met other exhibitors and even experienced the simulation of docking a spacecraft to the International Space Station at the Boeing CST-100 Starliner Simulator demo. Here’s a link to a clip of President Obama’s speech at the conference where he mentions Girls of Steel.

Boeing CST-100 Starliner Simulator demo at the White House Frontiers Conference.

How did being on the “25 Women in Robotics” list impact the group?

While a lot of the girls that experienced the full impact of the article have now graduated, being mentioned so highly still astounds many members of the team. Even girls who were new members are shocked we were considered to be in the top 25, out of every woman in robotics in 2014. It made a big mark on our community that we were recognized. It truly is a reminder and validator that we matter and are making a difference in the world around us. That is one of the best things that can be said about what we put our time and effort towards.

Young participant assembling the chassis at the White House Frontiers Conference in Pittsburgh, PA

How do you cope with changing membership as girls move on to new study/work opportunities?

At the end of each season, we elect a new Leadership Council for the upcoming year. A form is sent out to the girls asking if they are interested in a leadership position and why they think they would make a great leader. Then a panel of Girls of Steel mentors and alumni conduct interviews for all applicants and discuss and select the leadership council for the upcoming season. To incorporate new girls into our team we hold a new girl orientation meeting, we invite them to come to the leadership council meetings, and we create a group of three girls: returning, new, and junior member, a triad, which gets together during meetings. This creates our sense of team culture – friendly, welcoming, and fun.

As one of our new parents said, “My daughter has found her tribe.”

How important has robotics been to new career options for the team?

Girl of Steel Robotics has increased the interests of many girls pursuing a career in the STEM fields. It also helps develop the skills needed for a variety of careers in STEM. It has given the girls confidence to enter fields that are traditionally male dominant and helps teach them the tools to excel.

What do you want to get out of being in the women in robotics network?

The most rewarding part of being a girl involved in robotics is inspiring other girls and women who are intimidated by the STEM fields. By giving a clear example of female success in STEM, we can encourage other girls to get involved and eliminate the mindset that girls do not belong in male-dominated fields. At Carnegie Mellon University, we also have access to a supportive Society of Women Engineers chapter that is always looking to make connections with other girls.

Do you have anything you’d like to say to other young women?

We would like to tell others: they really can do it! No matter how difficult or intimidating STEM fields seem there is always a supportive network of women ready to support and encourage you in your pursuit of different careers. Also, as a woman, you are more than capable of succeeding in any field you set your mind to!

Read more about the Girls of Steel, here:

How to get started (and progress) in robotics: A quick guide for teens and adults

Robots for Roboticists — Wed, 09 Dec 2015 16:39:30 +0000

SparkFun Inventor’s Kit for RedBot.

I get many questions from people about how I think kids and adults should get started in robotics, how they should progress, and what they should buy, to learn about robotics. This is a quick guide to help you get going.

I’ve described three levels below — Level 1 is for people older than 12; Level 2 is for people older than 15, and Level 3 is for people over 18. An adult can probably start at Level 2 if desired, however starting at Level 1 will give you important basic skills and knowledge that you can build on.

Don’t worry about the details. You do not need to learn how SPI or wifi work, for example, but you will slowly pick up the details as you use them.

Level 1 – Getting Started with Micros

Set a clear and realistic goal – Robots are hard, so match your expectations to your skills. Your first robot should be really simple.
Recommended Book – Make: Arduino Bots and Gadgets: Six Embedded Projects with Open Source Hardware and Software and Arduino Robot Bonanza
Get your hands dirty – Learn how to mechanically and electrically build a robot.
- For this task, design and build a robot that uses an Arduino Uno, 2-4 motors, 2-4 simple sensors, a switch, a LED and a battery.
- The Sparkfun Inventors Kit for Redbot is a great choice for this step.
- Design on paper what the robot should look like and the parts that you need (if you buy a kit, use it, but then modify it).
- Build the robot using basic hand and power tools.
Learn how to program – Use the Arduino to program the robot.
- Start by simply making the light on the Arduino blink. If you have never done this before, it will take longer than you think it!
- Spin a single motor.
- Read from your sensors and play with them – use Microsoft Excel to generate a calibration curve.
- Combine the sensors and motor code to do what you desire.
Join a robotics club – There are many options! For example:
- School robotics club
- First Robotics
- Society of Robots

Level 2 – Getting Started with Embedded Computing

Set a clear and realistic goal – Build upon what you learned in Level 1 to set goals for level 2.
Recommended Book – Make a Raspberry Pi-Controlled Robot: Building a Rover with Python, Linux, Motors, and Sensors
Get your hands dirty – Learn how to mechanically and electrically build a robot.
- For this task, design and build a robot that uses a Raspberry Pi computer, 2-4 motors, 2-4 sensors, and a battery
- Design your parts with a CAD tool (such as Google Sketchup or Solidworks)
- Think about how you will interface your sensors to the computer?
- Use new materials and construction techniques. Try to use a 3D printer or laser cutter if possible.
Learn how to program – Use the Linux computer to program the robot.
- Learn basic C++ or Python, try talking to serial ports.
- Make your robot act as desired.

Level 3 – Advanced Computing

Set clear and realistic goals – You should increase the difficulty of your goals as you advance. At this point, try setting a goal that you’d like to attempt, even if you are not sure you can achieve it.
Learn basic trig and statistics – Learn the basic math that you need for robotics.
Get someone else’s hands dirty – Design a part and shop it out to be machined.
Learn how to use more advanced sensors – Such as a Camera and/or LIDAR.
Software – Learn the Robot Operating System (ROS).
Algorithms – Continue making software more advanced. Autonomy, mapping, device drivers, etc…

Each level will take time to develop and learn, but following this path will ensure that you have the knowledge you’ll need to progress to the next level.

Additional Resources

I tend to like Sparkfun for buying hobby parts. Other places you should look are Adafruit, and Pololu. They all have blogs and tutorials for using the hardware they sell, including basic robotics, Arduino, and Raspberry Pi.

ep.193: The Open Academic Robot Kit, with Raymond Sheh

Ron Vanderkley — Fri, 16 Oct 2015 18:22:36 +0000

Transcript below.

In this episode, Ron Vanderkley speaks with Raymond Sheh, who is a Senior Lecturer at the Department of Computing at Curtin University and head of the Intelligent Robots Group.

They discuss his Open Academic Robot Kit initiative, which aims to build an international community of students and researchers, all designing and building robots using a compatible set of electronic and basic mechanical components, plus 3D printed parts. Builders then publish their designs so that anyone can recreate and build on them.

Raymond Sheh
Raymond Sheh is a Senior Lecturer at the Department of Computing, Curtin University. He specialises in the areas of Artificial Intelligence, Robotics and Cyber Security, and has been involved in robotics research since 2003.

Raymond’s current activities include robotics for hazardous environments, surgical robotics and the application of robotic sensing technologies to industrial automation. The former includes a significant education and research outreach component to other universities and high schools through his position on the Executive Committee of the International RoboCup Rescue Robot League competition.

Prior to joining Curtin in 2013, Raymond was with the US National Institute of Standards and Technology, developing standardised test methods for response robots used in hazardous environments. He holds a PhD in Artificial Intelligence from The University of New South Wales, an Honours degree in Electronic and Communications Engineering from Curtin University and a degree in Computer Science from Curtin University.

Links:

Transcript

Ron Vanderkley: Raymond, can I get you to introduce yourself to the podcast listeners?

Raymond Sheh: Hi. My name is Raymond Sheh. I’m a senior lecturer here at the Department of Computing at Curtin University [in Perth, Western Australia]. I have also recently started the Intelligent Robots Group with the aim of doing research into intelligent robots that not only perform their tasks but also can explain what they’re doing and inform us.

Ron Vanderkley: Great! I’ve heard so much about the RoboCup Rescue Confined Space Challenge. Is that something that you can quickly describe to us?

Raymond Sheh: Sure. Prior to coming to coming to Curtin, I worked with the US National Institute of Standards and Technology on developing standard ways for testing response robots — that is, robots being used by bomb squads, search and rescue, hazardous materials and so on. One of the outreach activities of this project was the RoboCup Rescue Robot League competition. This is a robotics competition — an international one — for robots that tackle this very problem: robots going into places where humans don’t want to go in order to perform tasks and discover information.

In fact, the robots that have participated in this competition have already been quite useful out in the field. You might recall the robots that made it to the top of the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant in order to inspect the equipment and see what was still out there, trying to make that area safe. The robots that actually made it to the top came out of the RoboCup Rescue Robot League competition and were then repurposed for the task.

We are tackling tasks that have traditionally required fairly decently equipped universities with a correspondingly large budget. We’re not simplifying them but we’re tackling it at a smaller scale, at a scale that is possible for high schools to replicate. In line with this, we are also developing the Open Academic Robot Kit. This is a family of robot designs where all of the mechanical parts are 3D printable on a low cost printer — that is, a printer costing less than $1000.

All of the other parts are available off the shelf or by mail order anywhere in the world and all the design instructions and source code are available in easily editable form under an open source license. The idea is that anyone, anywhere in the world can download all of the information; they can reproduce the base design for this robot. They can use the competition as an application to inspire their own development and their own research and then they can redistribute this back to the international community so that everyone can build on it.

The aim is to be a catalyst, not just for this application but for bringing interesting, research level robotics, in general, to high schools and the community.

Ron Vanderkley: Is the uptake of participation increasing?

Raymond Sheh: Indeed. We ran our first pilot in the first half of this year with Scotch College and Christchurch Grammar. We also had a school from Canberra participating in collaboration with the University of New South Wales, as well as one from Maryland in the US participating in collaboration with the National Institute of Standards and Technology at the Gaithersburg Campus. We all went to the international competition, which was held in China this year, and we held some demonstrations.
The goal is to have more schools participate in the second half of this year. So that, next year, when the competition is being held in Leipzig in Germany, we would have our first truly international event at this scale, with high schools tackling what was previously university level research.

Ron Vanderkley: This is kind of like a DARPA challenge?

Raymond Sheh: It’s a little bit different to the DARPA challenge. I was actually involved in developing the challenges within the DARPA robotics challenge back when I was working with NIST. The DARPA challenges were deliberately very difficult. There’s a term called “DARPA hard,” because they’re trying to induce such a disruptive improvement in capabilities. You really do require fairly significant resources to devote to this.
The DARPA competition’s aim is to improve capabilities very rapidly and they use the fact that this is a very impressive competition as the motivator for getting people interested outside in the general community. We have similar goals but we tackle it a slightly different way. We present a challenge that is within reach of an interested designer technology teacher and a dozen high school students. They can tackle the problems that we put in front of them. They don’t just have to watch from the sidelines. They’re able to participate, they’re able to actually solve these challenges in ways that are very interesting, in ways that the university researchers may not have thought of. That’s one of the wonderful things about this challenge: everyone can be a researcher, everyone can be an inventor in their area of expertise and then they can share that with the rest of the world.

Ron Vanderkley: Hence an Open Challenge?

Raymond Sheh: Hence the Open Challenge. Of course, the DARPA robotics challenge was also open. DARPA actively encourages the teams to publish and transition their developments outside. We just tackle them at slightly different scales.

Ron Vanderkley: If an enthusiast wanted to find out more about the Open Academic Robotics Kit, is there a website?

Raymond Sheh: Indeed. The website for the open academic robot kit is oarkit.org, Open Academic Robot Kit. We also have information linked from our group, intelligentrobots.org

Ron Vanderkley: What do you think the future is for robotics? Where do you think we’re going?

Raymond Sheh: Well I think that there are a few frontiers that we do need to address in robotics that, arguably, haven’t had the focus that I think they’ve deserved. I’m sure that your listeners are very aware of the various high profile cyber attacks that have been happening around the place. They’re starting to attack what we call “cyber physical systems,” computer systems that have an impact in the real world. The electricity grid is one, but robots, automated buildings and the like are another.

Security in these robotic systems is somewhat lacking, mostly because the intersection between people doing robotics and people doing cyber security hasn’t been as tight as it should be. I think one of the big frontiers that needs to be addressed is: how do we make these systems secure? Here at the Department of Computing we also have a big focus on cyber security and we mesh our activities very closely.

The next area where I have some concerns is that of the engineering of the software that goes into a lot of automated systems. As these systems become ever more complicated and ever more connected and ever more modular, issues with bugs and maintaining difficulties become quite significant. The development of good software engineering practices and infrastructures becomes ever more important, in order to make sure that these systems do the right thing and do what they intend to do. Again, naturally, software engineering is one of the areas that the Department of Computing here has a strong focus on.

When people talk about worrying about the robot apocalypse, I think the problem isn’t going to be that the robots, all of a sudden, decide that humans are a nuisance and do away with us like they seem to do in the movies. I think what is a risk is either some fairly catastrophic bug, a mistake that causes issues, or a Doctor Evil somewhere who breaks into our systems and commandeers them. The scary thing is if they do it well, if we don’t have protection in place, if we don’t have the defenses, we won’t know until it’s too late.

I think those issues are more important than questions about whether artificial intelligence systems are going to become sentient. We should worry more about the people who are already sentient.

Ron Vanderkley: What advice would you give a person interested in robotics? Should they look at a multidisciplinary approach?

Raymond Sheh: A multidisciplinary approach. I don’t necessarily advocate doing what I did. I couldn’t decide what I wanted to do so I did a double degree. In my case it was electronic and communications engineering and computer science, here at Curtin University. Even if you do your degree in, say, computer science or electronic engineering or whatever the case may be, get involved in the robotics club, get involved in open source projects, get involved in other activities that keep you in touch with all of these other areas.
Robotics competitions are actually very good for this. They make you tackle a problem that hasn’t been solved before and give you the freedom to do so in a way that exercises all of these different areas. We don’t care how you build the robot, you just need to solve this problem.

You need good computer science, you need good electronic engineering because you need to be able to make sense of the world and you need to have sufficient power and you need to communicate. You also need good mechanical engineering because your robot has to survive and good art because your robot has to be able to convey this information to a human.

Ron Vanderkley: Where does art fit into the equation?

Raymond Sheh: Well, problem solving is an art. If you think about it, problem solving is an art form. That’s one way of looking at it. When I refer to art in robotics, though, I actually refer more to the consideration of human factors and the fact that this system needs to convey meaning to a human and needs to be able to receive the human’s intent. That requires an understanding of how humans behave both rationally as well as emotionally.

A human system interaction that is well informed from an art perspective will surely be easier for the vast majority of people to interact with than one that has not had that consideration. I think art is very important in that regard. The other aspect of it, the field of art … I think we’re starting to get to the point where the field of art can be augmented by robotics in a way that is assessable economically and technically for many more artists.

One of the things that I hope will happen with the Open Academic Robotic kit isn’t just that it gets picked up by researchers and scientists and engineers, I hope that it gets picked up by artists too. They don’t need to modify any of the electronics or any of the code. Because everything is 3D printed they can make these devices, and make robots more artistic, more aesthetically appealing. They can design them to elicit emotions and to appear as different things.

I think, certainly, that while we may not necessarily want a response robot that looks like a kangaroo or looks like a creature of some sort, having that kind of influence can only be beneficial.

Ron Vanderkley: Thank you on behalf of the podcast for your time.

Raymond Sheh: It was a pleasure. Thank you.

Work, play and STEM: How robotics will bridge the gap

Ricky Ye — Thu, 08 Oct 2015 21:13:55 +0000

Learning how to solder at the Ann Arbor Mini Maker Faire.

As advancements to how we approach STEM education and initiatives are on the rise around science, engineering and mathematics, we’re seeing a greater impact on how we recognize children’s development and understanding of now-vital tech skills, robotics will continue to play an important role.

To better understand the role of robotics in STEM education, let’s take a step back. According to the MIT Media Lab, coding has become the new literacy, meaning that, in this context, children must learn to design and create digital technology via honed skills such as programming. This said, currently, only one in 10 schools across the United States actively teach children to code. This suggests that the majority of students nationwide – despite the critical need to hone STEM skills – is not receiving institutional support, and must therefore rely on their own initiative, or their family’s.

The Future of STEM is Synonymous with the Future of Work

Schools must more rapidly adopt implementation of STEM-based programs, especially those including programming and coding instruction, particularly as such skills will become more essential than ever before. This is the case due to a specific practical reason: work, and the job market. According to Oxford University, as many as 47 percent of jobs in the United States will become wholly automated within the next 20 years. This will lead to a transformation of labor, and will generate new job opportunities.

Another university – the University of Florida – has also found that demand for STEM-trained workers will not only drastically increase in the United States, but also across the globe. The research independently studied student interaction with educational robots and resulting STEM understanding. Using educational robots to facilitate elementary school students’ understandings, the study found an improved attitude towards mathematics among students. As well, the student group working directly with robots demonstrated a higher depth of knowledge of and efficacy in math, science, engineering and tech. What’s especially notable about this study is that it aligns with a movement towards STEM education at even the elementary level. To date, robotic education has been targeted towards the secondary education level, which must change.

Currently, we’re seeing robotics set on a trajectory to impact wide-ranging fields such as medicine & medical, industry, military and disaster relief. In addition, according to analyst firm Forrester, by the year 2025, 16 percent of today’s jobs will have given way to automated positions. That said, the equivalent of nine percent of job growth will occur – not only as industries expand, but as new positions and job categories such as robotic repair and maintenance are created. Furthermore, by 2019, 25 percent of all job tasks will be offloaded to either software robots or physical robots. The impact of robotics is unavoidable, which makes STEM skills both essential and synonymous with the future of work.

The Next Computer Industry? A State of Play

From our perspective, in the next decade, robotics will become the next computer industry. For instance, robotic use will continue to become standardized, as robots will aid in processes such as manufacturing, security and even household chores. To put it simply: this means that education around robotics—led by STEM initiatives—will be even more prominent, similar to the rise of computer tech in the late 1980s.

Just as software engineering led us into the digital age, today, robotic education will prove to be an essential bridge to the future of innovation. To achieve this and to implement STEM-minded education programs, institutions must fully embrace initiatives spurred by major tech companies, such as Google’s recently announced Expeditions Pioneer Program. Promoting virtual reality in the classroom, the emphasis is on merging tech and learning. In addition, city and even state governments must allocate resources to support tech in schools. Taking New York as an example: the city recently unveiled a plan to offer computer science to all students within the public school system within the next decade.

To efficiently promote STEM skills among children, toy developers must also have a stake in STEM initiatives. By providing children with gaming options that offer both pragmatic tech-forward skills as well as a traditional sense of play, toys—for example by way of robotics (think open source robot)—can bridge the gap between both digital and physical gaming worlds. This brings robotics to life, and in effect, ensures children will experience STEM opportunities not only in the classroom but also at home, making the future of robotics bright.

ep.189: Robots and Communication, with Eleanor Sandry

Ron Vanderkley — Fri, 21 Aug 2015 19:04:00 +0000

Transcript included.

In this episode, Ron Vanderkley speaks with Dr. Eleanor Sandry of Curtin University about her new book Robots and Communication. In the interview, we explore human to animal communication and what we can learn from it; human to humanoid robots interaction; and human to non-humanoid robots interactions. Also, we discuss Western and Eastern perceptions of robotics.

Dr. Eleanor Sandry

Eleanor Sandry is a Lecturer in the Department of Internet Studies at Curtin University in Perth, Western Australia. Her research is focused on developing an ethical and pragmatic recognition of, and respect for, otherness and difference in communication. Much of her work explores communication theory and practice by analysing human-robot interactions in science fact, science fiction and creative art.

Links:

Transcript

Ron Vanderkley: Good morning Eleanor, if I can first ask you to introduce yourself to The Podcast listeners.

Eleanor Sandry: Hi there, well I’m Eleanor Sandry. I’m a lecturer in Internet Studies at Curtin University in Western Australia. My research is about communication in general, not just on theinternet and I’m particularly interested in human-robot interactions so that we can understand communication more broadly.

Ron Vanderkley: What got my attention to your subject was an up and coming book that appeared at a conference listing, if you can briefly tell us a little bit about the work on this book?

Eleanor Sandry: Yeah, so the book is called Robots in Communication and it’s been published by Paul Grave in the Pivot Series, which means it’s available online and print on demand. It’s a short format book, 45,000 words. It’s shorter than your average monograph and that’s because I wanted it to be accessible to a range of different people. It’s pitched towards people who are interested in robots, people who are interested in communication – human communication theories – so it’s trying to cater for quite a large audience. What it does is look at human-robot interactions and it tries to unpick them in some detail from a number of different theoretical perspectives.

I’m particularly interested in broadening the size of communication beyond just the transmission of information and ideas of success that surround accurately transmitting it. I’m interested in non-verbal communication; the idea that it isn’t just about what we say, but it’s about us using facial expressions and also movements more generally. I found that robots were just agreat way of looking at a huge range of different types of communication because they are sometimes built to look as human-like as possible, but on other occasions are completely machine-like, and yet what you find is the people who interact with them often develop some kind of relation to them. Even to a Roomba and other iRobot floor cleaners. Just looking at that gives me a whole range of different forms of communication to consider and things I can say about communication in general.

Ron Vanderkley: You speak about this idea of humanoid robots and the non-robots as a point of contact. What actually steers you towards the humanoid? Is it the facial features, the gestures, themovements?

Eleanor Sandry: I think that most people are studying humanoid robots because of particular facial features and expressions, in some cases. But, in others, it’s to do with physical ability to move around in human-like environments. One ofthereasons the Atlas robot – which is about to compete in the darker challenges – is human-like is because it’s expected to go and work in environments that are tailored for humans, but where humans can no longer enter, for example because of some catastrophic disaster.

In fact, I am much more drawn to non-humanoid robots and I’m particularly interested in the way that people will still read pretty much anything that moves as somehow trying to communicate with them. I’m also conscious of the fact that people who are trying to work with robots do better if they do develop this kind of relationship with them. Part of what I have been writing in the book is actually about looking at how those relationships develop and seeing those, say, between humans in ordinance explosive disposal and their robots. Relationshipsbetween people and robots are not necessarily a bad thing or something that we should be worried about; it actually allows those teams to operate better in real world environments.

Although a lot of people say that a sociable robot needs to be able to make gestures, maybe to also have facial expressions; that depends on the structure of the robot. I think there is a lot to be learnt from human-animal interactions. The things that humans and animals are capable of doing together open up possibilities for lots of other forms, for robots to be seen as effective teammates, basically.

Ron Vanderkley: For instance, canine interactions, this kind of trust and understanding. That is a whole different facet and we are still coming to termswith how wecan do that in robotics. Are you picking that apart and trying to figure out how wecan do that?

Eleanor Sandry: Yeah, I’m particularly interested in the idea of the need to have, almost, a trust and respect relationship in order for the team to operate effectively together. In the human-canine relationship, there would always be an overarching power relation. The human is almost always in control of the overallsituation and is working with the dog to achieve a particular purpose, for instance tracking a scent trail. The same is true with humans and robots and, at the moment, say with ordinance disposal robots, broadly, the human is in control almost 100 per cent of the time: they’re still mainly radio controlled or controlledvia wire connection. There are some things that they can perform autonomously like righting themselves if they fall over and maybe also returning to base.

What I’ve been trying to unpick, I suppose, is the idea that if a robot is going to become more autonomous, it will be out of contact with its human controller. There needs to be a more complex relation between the human andthe machine in order for that team to operate well. Thehuman effectively has to relinquish control to the machine at the point of which it moves out of radio contact, they have to trust in the robot to do its job. All of these ideas – even the terminology of me saying to do its job – isproblematic, historically, in understanding human-animal relations. Because many people think that a dog doesn’tknow what its job is, or isn’t going to take responsibility, and yet people who train dogs will tell you that this is precisely the way that you need to think about the dog in order tounderstand what is happening in the team, because you don’t have the nasal senses that the dog does.

It’s actually important that you trust a dog to do its job, so when it appears to be moving off a trail, in fact its followinga path that you have no idea exists and it will bring you to the final point; will complete the task effectively. I think thereare possibilities of the same thing between human robot teams, where the robot has senses that a human doesn’t. You have to learn to trust in those senses and I think it’s an interesting way to think about these relations. I think it has practical possibilities in the robotics community, but I also think it tells me all sorts of interesting things about how humans and other things interact.

Ron Vanderkley: The idea that we could try to use speech recognition between robot andobject, that being the only means of communication in the animal or non-animal world, is not entirely true. It’s looking at gestures, our voice.Is this also something that we may not have looked at in the robotic world?

Eleanor Sandry: Well I think there is a tendency. It’s not so much that it hasn’t been looked at but that the final goal is seen as being able to create a robot that it’s possible to activate entirely with just your voice and that will understand human expressions and gestures perfectly. I think that what’s being missed is that the robot could understand things differently from us. It’s not actually necessary to embed the robot in the world ina human-like way. It can be embedded in its own way and understand us in particular ways, even if that’s using sensors on hands that help direct the robot. Actually looking at those as real possibilities, not a problem that needs to be overcome, has potential forincreasing the flexibility of the way robots work.

The other reason I’m particularly interested in that is because I hope to start writing more about critical disability studies. That has really opened my eyes to the fact that technologies that are currently being directed towards very human-like interfaces may actually make it harder for people with disabilities to interact with a robot that might otherwise be very helpful to them in living their everyday lives independently. Really looking at a whole range of different interfaces for machines like this is important; not just thinkingof trying to perfect this notion of the human-like interface. I just don’t want them to cut down possibilities I suppose.

When I talk to people sometimes about robots, I get two reactions: normally, I get the people who are really firmly interested in human-like forms and want to make sociable robots as human-like as possible, and then I sometimes get other people that say “we never make robotshuman-like.” I get this divergent reaction and, really, I’m somewhere in the middle, trying to say “well, can’t we think about this differently? Can’t we think about this froma communication perspective, where you start seeing all the different ways that people and things and animals can communicate?” Because you’re quite right, of course, dogs don’t just respond to voice, they respond to tone of voice. They also understand things in ways that we can’t really possibly fully appreciate because wejust don’t have the senses that a dog does.

Ron Vanderkley: The other aspect I was considering is that we are talking about robots actually understanding us. I spoke to a guy in the UK about, I think, a robot called Hector, where it’s entertainment. It’s a robot telling the general public what is going on, with hand gestures, eye movements, et cetera. It’s a teaching tool, almost. I found that very interesting. Is that also something that you’re looking at?

Eleanor Sandry: I suppose it’s not my primary area of interest but that doesn’t mean I don’t think it’s important. I think that sometimes when I talk it’s easy for me to get obsessed with all the non-humanoid robots and it makes it sound a bit like I’m actually saying that we shouldn’t have humanoid robots and I don’t think that’s correct at all. I’m sure there are going to be situations where a humanoid robot works much better and that is probably a very good example. If you have a robot that you want to actually present to people and you want, effectively, to present it in a human-like way, then that is what you’re aiming for. You’re aiming for something that inspires the audience to pay attentionto it because of its abilities – that may sometimes be very important.

I think that thinking that that’s the only way to build a robot – that can be captivating, or attract attention, or draw people into communication – is probably incorrect and there are other examples. Certainly robots in art, for example, where a totally non-humanoid machine completely captivates its audience through its movements and the things it does, the sound it makes. It’s a very different idea; it’s not to try to transmit information directly but it’s still building a kind of relation between the human andthe machine that may lead us to question the ways that things exist in the world, which I think is usually quite a good thing. Also when things are framed by particular tasks, so anything where people and the robot aretrying to complete a task together kind of frames the communication that takes place.

I think it offers many more possibilities for non-humanoid communication in that particularsituation because you know what you’re aiming to do. And yourcapability of reading non-verbal communication is probably much greater in that situation. With the example of the robot up on stage, often a humanoid robot is going to win the game there.

Ron Vanderkley: When you look at the history of, say, robot interaction targeted at children or things like the first robot dog, where children actually relate to that almost as a real dog, and treat it as a real animal, do you think that’s the precursor to a closer relationship with non biological entities?

Eleanor Sandry: Well, I think its one direction in which to go. I’m slightly concerned by the idea of trying to create robots that effectively replace a relationship that someone would have with something that already exists in the world. It’s one of the reasons that I’m not so interested in humanoid developments, and also in the very animal-like robot developments, because it may notbe a good thing to replace the relationships that people already have with living things with a robot equivalent. Children are actually a fascinating example of humans who are freed from the need to justify all the decisions they make about how they’re going to interact with something and so, yes, theyreact to things, like a robotic dog,strongly. Their understanding, if something goes wrong with it, that it needs to rest or sleep, shows just how strong their understanding of the robot is.

I think that’s one of the reasons why I’m interested in robots that appear more overtly machine-like, because they remind you that you’re in quite acomplex new relationship with something that’s different. It’s different froman animal, it’s different from a human; it is its own thing.For example, I looked at interactions between humans and Guy Hoffman’s robot, which is a robotic desk lamp, a lighting assistant, and they did experiments together. People’sinteractions during the interaction were very much as if it was somewhat alive, not necessarily like an animal or anything else, it was an alive desk lamp. But you could still switch it off; it was still a machine as well.

Humans are capable of holding both of those ideas. I think children may be less worried about that, so as a specific example they do show just how far those relations can go. I suppose I’m interested in how you can signify that those relationships are actually different, that it is still a machine. However, I don’t really think that robots should replace human-animal relations. I just read something recently about a different researcher in Australia who has written about how he thinks, in the future, humans will have robotic animals and that immediately made me think of Doandroids dream of electric sheep? The original book has a very strong section in the front that is about the ownership of robotic animals being all that was possible for most people. The richest people had a real animal. It seemed to be that future idea and I hope and pray that we are not going to go that way.

Ron Vanderkley: No. There’s a concern throughout the entireinternetaboutthe future of autonomous robots, AI being this Skynet-kind of world, by those who I think are quite smart people. It kind of sends the wrong signals. I just wanted to see your take on things.

Eleanor Sandry: Well, my take on it is artificial intelligence has a long way to go before it ever getsto that kind of level. I also think that the way that it’s being developed at the moment, it’s not necessarily ever going to be the same as a human-like intelligence. An artificial intelligence is going to be different almost certainly. Yes, I get frustrated at the hype around the technology, and you’re right, it’s very respected voices that are raising these kinds of issues,and in the near future as well. I simply don’t think it’s going to happen in the near future and I don’t actually think it’s going to happen the way that some people are suggesting it might either.

I would definitely want to draw back from that and point out just how far away artificial intelligence is from being at that level. I mean Google Drive. These cars don’t drive everywhere; they drive in one particular place, where it’s been mapped sufficiently for them to be able to operate. I don’t think that people are necessarily aware of that when it’s reported in the mainstream media.

Ron Vanderkley: Not at all, and humanoid robots actually cost an awful lot of money to build …

Eleanor Sandry: Huge amount.

Ron Vanderkley: I don’t even know if Sony is actually able to clear a real amount of money.

Eleanor Sandry: I doubt it very much. I mean, that robot has been in a series of developments, way over a decade now, and still has issues being placed into a normal physical environment and operating successfully. It has to be ina controlled environment. I think that the general public probably isn’t aware of that. The difference between seeinga robot acting in a laboratory, in a controlled setting, and actually being able to interact in the normal physical world that we live in is something completely different. They are streets apart.

I saw something about the darker challenge basically explaining that they would be very impressed if one of the Atlas robots, or any of the other bipedal robots, actually manages to make it through the course without falling down. I think that that’s a realistic understanding of what’s possible at the moment. The idea that robots with four legs might actually operate more easily in those types of environments is fair and should be perceived as well. It’s a very interesting question.

Ron Vanderkley: Absolutely, and just in a previous podcast I was talking to some guys about soft robotics. I mean that’s completely going …

Eleanor Sandry: Totally, a very fascinating area.

Ron Vanderkley: Yeah, completely, a different direction and its early days.

Eleanor Sandry: Yeah, very early days, but there is so much potential for soft robotics but also mixtures of soft and hard. I saw ages ago that, rather than using a hand-like gripper to pick things up, someone had developedsomething that could actually… it was almost like something filled with coffee.

Ron Vanderkley: Like a bean bag.

Eleanor Sandry: Like a bean bag yes, that could grip. Those sorts of innovative ideas that are thinking of totally different ways of solving the task, rather than trying to make something that has a human-like hand, seem to me to offer tremendous potential and so I’m fascinated by the idea of what a robot might end up looking like in the future. I’m kind of encouraged that maybe robots in the future won’t look like us and actually that would be a really good thing.

Ron Vanderkley: That’s another human concern. Someone once put it that if we try and design something that looks so close to a humanand almost mimics the face, there’s total distrust. Whereas if it looks like a robot there is more trust.

Eleanor Sandry: I think there definitely is potential. I mean whenever I write about robots I always end up having to utilize the uncanny valleyexample. I’m kind of quite frustrated with it now: that idea that, as a robot becomes more and more human-like,eventually it’s actually read as zombie-like and there is a strong drop off in the level of trust in the robot. Some people suggest that you could climb the valley on the other side and eventually end up with aperfect human-like machine. Then, as has been written about in many different science fiction books, you have the question of what is the difference between the robot and the human and …

Ron Vanderkley: Silicon versus Calvin.

Eleanor Sandry: I think, really, we’re nowhere near achieving that at the moment. Even the very, very human-like faces you can see pretty easily from their expressions and from other things about them. I don’t know why we want to aim for that. I think that we have …

Ron Vanderkley: Perfection.

Eleanor Sandry: Yes, but it seems to be a perfection that’s driven by a100 percent understanding of humans being the pinnacle of evolution and, therefore, that should be the pinnacle of robotic development. That just seems to me an unfortunate decision to make. There are many more options for robotics than trying to achieve human-like status. I think that there are many other ways that machines could be far more interesting, far more useful but also maybe even develop new relations with people that don’t have to be like something that already exists.

Ron Vanderkley: One of the ideas in modern day sci-fi, the cyborg…

Eleanor Sandry: Yes, the idea of augmenting human ability, of fixing people, which is a very hot topic in disability studies because,in general, there aremany people with disabilities who do not wish to be fixed.Again, it’s driven by this idea of the human being the current pinnacle of evolution. Let’s see howfar we can take it. I hesitate to mention this but, as Dona Harrower said many, many years ago, in 1985 actually, we are already cyborg. I’m effectively a cyborg: I wear contact lenses; that’s the only way I can exist in this world. I would not be alive without those developments – of glasses or contact lenses. But where people begin to decide to amputate limbs, in order to have blades, because that means they can ran faster, that’s another thing science fiction is written about. There are all sorts of – not just ethical – questions, but bigger questions around that.

Ron Vanderkley: You brought up sci-fi as a sounding board. Do you use that as a sounding board for some of your ideas or your thoughts?

Eleanor Sandry: Often I do, yes: in fact, in robots and communication. Science fiction to me is a really great place to look because it’s sometimes overlooked as being a kind of subgenre. For some people, for many years, it was not real literature and not something that was studied much in scholarly circles. But it provides a real sounding board and some of the best science fiction writers write about embedding technology in societiesin ways that allow you to really think about some of these questions ina more developed way,because someone has written a story about it. It seems to provide a reallygreat way of thinking through some of the questions that are very difficult to picture in your head, whereas science fiction provides you with those kinds of thought experiments that can be so important.

In my thesis – what I was doing for my PhD- I did write more about science fiction: the idea of culture and human-machine interactions in culture were to me very interesting because they push way into the far future I guess.

Ron Vanderkley: Coming back on the idea that technology is going to take over. Is that something that you think that’s going to be more and more of a problem, as sci-fi seems to dwell on the bad things and not the positives, or is that just good for entertainment?

Eleanor Sandry: Well, it’s definitely good for entertainment. It’s also a very Western perspective on robots andtechnology. Whereas in Japanese Manga, the whole idea of technology, and robots in particular, is far more positive. Also, it’s a great pity that we lost [Iain] Banks because that was someone writing about a utopian feature, problematic in lots of ways, but at least he offered some kind of positive vision of the way things could work. You’re right, in general, there will still often… they’re not exactly disaster movies are they? But they’re kind of …

Ron Vanderkley: The good guy always seems to win in the end.

Eleanor Sandry: In the end but there is usually a potential for total disaster in the middle, isn’t there?

Ron Vanderkley: Okay, so in closing, what do you think is going to happen in the field of robotics, well, in Australia?

Eleanor Sandry: Australia is interesting and I’m still trying to get to grips with what’s happening in different parts of Australia. I think that the level of funding here may be very different from other countries. There are interesting things going on and I really need to spend more time getting to grips with them because I keep on reading things about what people are doing in Melbourne, starting with robotic arms, the disabled, people with disabilities, and I’m interested that there is stuff going on in Sydney. I’m seeing people from the Center for Social Robotics there, and so I’m particularly interested in what they’re doing and the cost as well.

I think robotics will continue to develop here. There is probably quite astrong drive towards thinking of robots in terms of self-driving machines, mind technology. That’s always going to be a big thing in this country. There are definitely innovative thinkers in Australia who produce interesting solutions to different problems and I would like to carry on finding out what they’re doing and writing about it.

Ron Vanderkley: Okay and to cap that off, if I can firstly thank you for giving the time to chat. On behalf ofThe Podcast, thank you very much.

Eleanor Sandry: Well, thank you for having me. It’s been great to talk.

All audio interviews are transcribed and edited for clarity with great care, however, we cannot assume responsibility for their accuracy.

ep.188: Mobile Microrobotics Challenge, with Leanne King and Ioan Alexandru

Audrow Nash — Fri, 07 Aug 2015 06:25:28 +0000

Transcript below.

In this interview, Audrow Nash talks to two teams from Mobile Microrobotics Challenge at the 2015 International Conference for Robotics and Automation (ICRA).

The first team was from the University of Hawaii, Manoa. We spoke with Leanne King about the Autonomous Mobility & Accuracy Challenge. In this competition, teams try to move a small robot accurately around a shape. The robot can be a small piece of metal or even a bubble generated by a laser. Leanne’s team won the Mobility & Accuracy Challenge.

The second team was from West University of Timișoara (UVT) in Romania. We spoke to Ioan Alexandru Ivan about the Microassembly Challenge, where teams tried to move small triangles against walls and other fixtures using a micro-robot. The Ivan’s team placed second in the Microassembly Challenge.

Transcript:

Microrobotics Mobility and Accuracy Challenge: Interview 1

Audrow Nash: I’m at ICRA at the …

Edward Nerad: … Mobile Microrobotics Challenge.

Audrow Nash: And I am speaking to a team from …

Leanne King: … University of Hawaii, Manoa.

Audrow Nash: Would you introduce yourself?

Leanne King: My name is Leanne, I’m a senior Electrical Engineering student at Manoa. I’m joined by Edward and Caralyn. Edward just graduated and Caralyn is also is a senior.

Audrow Nash: Would you tell me a bit about the Challenge, the Mobility Challenge?

Leanne King: The Mobility Challenge was where you had to autonomously traverse three different shapes: a rectangle a triangle and a circle as quickly and accurately as possible. Teams were judged based on time, how big a robot you had and accuracy; how many landmarks you hit on the field.

Audrow Nash: First, what are these robots?

Leanne King: Microrobotics could be anything really. Most teams use magnetic dust and electromagnetics to control it. Our team uses bubbles. We generate our bubbles using lasers.

Audrow Nash: You generate the bubble using a laser?

Leanne King: Yes.

Audrow Nash: How does that work?

Leanne King: When you heat oil to a certain point, it creates differences in the surface tension. The thermal changes create surface tension in certain areas at the laser point that then generates a bubble.

Audrow Nash: Differences in surface tension?

Leanne King: Yeah, so then we can control that bubble using the same principle. The bubble wants to go to the laser.

Audrow Nash: Changing the surface tension of the area around it moves the bubble?

Leanne King: Yes.

Audrow Nash: Interesting. And so you direct the laser around these shapes and that’s how you control where the bubble goes for these challenges?

Leanne King: Yes, we pick certain points, like critical points. For example, a triangle has three vertices, we pick those three points and then the computer finds a solution for those lines and the laser just steps through them.

Audrow Nash: Is there a vision system? How are you looking at what this bubble does?

Leanne King: We have a camera looking thorough a microscope objective lens and that’s really it. We connected it to a computer and that’s how you see …

Audrow Nash: And you select the points manually, where you want it to go?

Leanne King: Yes, we pick our points. We were working on a visual system, using a camera, but it’s a little less reliable because our fields get dirty. So we decided to do it manually.

Audrow Nash: What are some of the major challenges with this?

Leanne King: Of our personal major challenges, our laser strength is very critical. If we don’t have a strong enough laser, or enough of a focused laser, the bubble won’t generate or we won’t be able to move it efficiently. The scale of the competition, because it’s on a micro scale …

Audrow Nash: Can you relate the scale to something?

Leanne King: Hair.

Audrow Nash: Like, is it 100^th of the thickness of a hair?

Leanne King: It’s like the thickness of a hair.

Audrow Nash: The thickness of a hair.

Leanne King: Yeah, the robots can be no bigger than 500 micrometers, and fields, I think, are three centimeters long. The entire course is 3 centimeters. It’s pretty small.

Audrow Nash: What are some future applications of this kind of research?

Leanne King: We’ve been doing some research into what this can be used for. Right now this is kind of a proof of concept thing that we can do something so small and move objects around with other small objects. Some research is already being done in the medical field where you can move particles in packets of medicine through a body with micro-robots. That will give us better precision and quicker recovery time or healing processes, and things like that. It has a lot of medical applications so far.

Audrow Nash: Are there applications outside of the medical field?

Leanne King: If you were able to create a system that can be put onto, for example, the BP oil spill, it can move those micro-particles and clean up the spill without humans needing to be in the water. If you move the micro-particles quickly, it will be able to clean it a little bit more efficiently.

Audrow Nash: How do you feel about the competition so far?

Leanne King: We’re enjoying it, we’re enjoying ourselves. Yesterday we did very well in the autonomous portion of the contest; we were one of only two teams to complete the challenge. That secures us first or second place, depending on how well we did compared to the other team. Today, we had some problems moving triangles in the mobility challenge, but we know what happened, what went wrong and how to fix it. So we’ll be back next year.

Audrow Nash: Thank you.

Leanne King: No, thank you.

Microrobotics Assembly Challenge: Interview 2

Audrow Nash: Would you tell me who you are?

Ioan Alexandru Ivan: I’m Alex Ioan, I’m an assistant professor at the University of Timișoara, which is located next to the capital city of Bucharest, Romania.

Audrow Nash: Would you tell me a bit about the Microassembly Challenge?

Ioan Alexandru Ivan: The Microassembly Challenge consists of pushing very small triangular objects, roughly the size of a human hair, into a very narrow channel of less than a millimeter in diameter. To be precise, it’s 750 microns, 0.75 of a millimeter. The winning team is the one that can insert the most triangular objects into this channel in two minutes.

There are several actuation principles involved, namely electromagnetics – these microrobotic devices are not tethered. This means that you cannot wire them; they should be operated wirelessly.

Audrow Nash: Yes, and so you control them with magnetic forces?

Ioan Alexandru Ivan: Yeah, with magnetic forces.

Audrow Nash: Can you tell me a bit about your setup that uses magnetic forces?

Ioan Alexandru Ivan: We use a set of four coils as you can see here. We have an arena, in the middle region, and inside we have the microrobotic agent that is a neodymium micro magnet of around 220 micrometers, each side.

Audrow Nash: What I’m looking at is a series of… there are four coils here?

Ioan Alexandru Ivan: Yeah.

Audrow Nash: And the coils, their cylinders in the top part are facing the neodymium magnet, correct? That’s in the center of all four coils, it kind of looks like a plus sign.

Ioan Alexandru Ivan: Well, we will generate magnetic gradient and this will attract the neodymium orient and the neodymium magnet towards the magnetic gradient field. So, with a joystick, we are able to drive these four coils and have very smooth movement.

Audrow Nash: What does the neodymium magnet do?

Ioan Alexandru Ivan: The neodymium magnet is the magnetic agent. It will respond to the magnetic field generated by the coils.

Audrow Nash: So, the neodymium magnet – is that what you’re moving?

Ioan Alexandru Ivan: Yes.

Audrow Nash: The coils that are in the plus shape, you put a current through them and this generates a magnetic field that moves the neodymium magnet – that’s the small microrobot that you’re moving. And it’s moving on a X-Y plane.

Ioan Alexandru Ivan: Exactly, X-Y and rotation.

Audrow Nash: And rotation.

Ioan Alexandru Ivan: And rotation: X-Y-R. They’re also doing 5D [indicating another group] so they also do Z, they have a much more complex setup.

Audrow Nash: So one of the groups behind us does depth as well.

Ioan Alexandru Ivan: Yeah, definitely you should ask them questions. However, we focused on integration, as you can see we have an all-inclusive device, all integrated.

Audrow Nash: Yes, it’s very small.

Ioan Alexandru Ivan: We have the smallest of the most compact ones and it’s very low cost. It’s based on open source technology. Here, you can see the Raspberry Pi …

Audrow Nash: So you have a Raspberry Pi with a touch screen?

Ioan Alexandru Ivan: Yeah, we developed a sort of shield for this one. We would like, eventually, to advertise it on Kickstarter or something like that.

Audrow Nash: That would be cool.

Ioan Alexandru Ivan: So we intend to further develop this product. It can help a lot for teaching, for instance. You can teach actuation principles, you can teach image processing, you can teach control systems.

Audrow Nash: It’s a nice little package for it.

Ioan Alexandru Ivan: Yes.

Audrow Nash: I agree. So, going back to the competition, you’re moving this neodymium magnet and it is pushing around these little triangles to try to put them together or put them against the wall. How did the competition go?

Ioan Alexandru Ivan: Quite well. Many competing teams were able to insert triangles and we also managed several. Right now, we’re having a small issue with one of the rules because they …

Audrow Nash: If the triangles go on to the borders.

Ioan Alexandru Ivan: If it goes out of bounds. In bounds, the ruling is a little bit fuzzy.

Audrow Nash: It’s not clear, I see.

Ioan Alexandru Ivan: But we still managed to insert around five or six triangles in the two- minute window.

Audrow Nash: And so, what are some of the applications of this technology?

Ioan Alexandru Ivan: Well, the main application could be biomedical. For instance, this type of task simulates pushing objects or medicine, drugs, into blood vessels or noninvasive surgery. One day, robotic agents with some cancer treatment drugs will be driven through the body to the tumor, and they will locally deliver chemo static medicines. I think this field will really grow; microrobotics develops more and more as the technology advances towards nanotechnology, micro-technology. This has huge potential for the future.

Audrow Nash: What about microassembly, actually building very small robots or something else, does this technology encompass that as well?

Ioan Alexandru Ivan: Yeah, you can build things.

Audrow Nash: What can we do with these small things?

Ioan Alexandru Ivan: We could build 3D micro systems, 3D MEMS (Micro-Electro-Mechanical Systems), besides the medical applications. Presently, MEMS are based on planar technology but, in the future, for further integration, some parts of the MEMS could be assembled in 3D to build, for instance, more integrated actuators, more lab-on-a-chip integrated devices that are not possible today. This could also be a way forward for more integrated applications.

Audrow Nash: Would this be similar to how they are now layering transistors for more space, rather than just moving along one plane?

Ioan Alexandru Ivan: Yeah, I’m not entirely familiar with that technology.

Audrow Nash: But that doesn’t require microrobots.

Ioan Alexandru Ivan: Well, I don’t know. Probably one day we’ll have extremely small devices based on this technology. They could be, for instance, taken by microrobotic manipulators and placed inside very small systems. The idea is to embed intelligence but we’re quite far from that stage.

Audrow Nash: Well, not actually intelligence within the robot but in how you control it, with an external magnetic field or a laser for example, correct?

Ioan Alexandru Ivan: Yeah, for the moment we cannot embed intelligence in a tiny robot under a millimeter. But these incremental steps will help, in the future, to develop such systems. It’s groundwork for future applications. The more we integrate, the more we are able to manipulate accurately and this will allow us to make the next generation of robots more integrated and more intelligent.

Audrow Nash: Thank you.

ep.175: Mobile Robots and Virtual Worlds, with Riccardo Cassinis

Audrow Nash — Fri, 06 Feb 2015 01:25:41 +0000

In this episode, Audrow Nash interviews Professor Riccardo Cassinis from the University of Brescia in Italy about using robotics in education. Cassinis speaks about having children, from primary school through university, access and control robots remotely to learn subjects such as programming, geography, and foreign languages.

Riccardo Cassinis

Riccardo Cassinis graduated in 1977 at the Politecnico di Milano in Electrical Engineering, where he continued to work until 1987 as a Fellow, Assistant Professor, and Research Associate. Currently at the University of Brescia, he is the Director of the Advanced Robotics Laboratory and an Associate Professor of Advanced Computer Programming and of Robotics. His current research interests aim at taking advantage of Internet technologies for building autonomous robots for surveillance and environmental data collection.

Links:

Breaking it down with the DanceBot: Getting started with electronics

Raymond Oung — Sat, 12 Oct 2013 17:29:50 +0000

The MP3 DanceBot is a little robot that dances to the beat of your music. It’s a project that began in the summer of 2011 to introduce students to the basics of electronics and robotics. Students learn some of the basic components found in modern day electronic appliances while constructing a robot, which they can take home and continue to play and develop with.

Two girls learn the basics of electronics while constructing a DanceBot

Tutorial Structure

The entire tutorial takes about 10 hours to complete and is tailored towards students aged 12 and above.

The project will be presented in six tutorials:

In the first tutorial (this one) we will be looking at how the DanceBot works, and will be covering how to read circuit diagrams.
In the second tutorial, we will look at how to construct the DanceBot’s power supply.
In the third tutorial, we will be building the DanceBot’s audio amplifier.
In the fourth tutorial, we will build the DanceBot’s micro controller, digital line converter and H-bridge.
In the fifth tutorial, we will assemble the DanceBot’s LEDs.
And in the final part, we will look at the mechanical construction, and how to program your DanceBot to groove to your favorite tunes!

But before we get started, let’s take a look at the final product:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XDDs63Z69Tc

Fun, funky and fabulous, but how does it work?

The picture below is a rough sketch of what we’ll be building in these tutorials. You’ll see some common elements found on many robots.

Some of the major components that you’ll find in the robot are:

Light Emitting Diodes (LEDs)
A speaker
Thick gauge wire
Electronics
A battery pack
An MP3-player
A base
Two wheels
Two motors

The key to how all of this works is the music that is played by your MP3-player. There are generally two channels (i.e. left-channel and right-channel) for music that you play on your MP3-player. These channels send music to your left and right ear, respectively. In the third part of the tutorial series, using the provided software, you will program dance moves into your favorite song by replacing the right-channel of music with binary-encoded dance moves! When your MP3-player is plugged in and you play your encoded song, the left-channel goes directly to an audio amplifier and plays the music through the speaker, while the right-channel goes to a small computer, which interprets the digital information as motor and light commands.

The left channel of the newly encoded MP3 file is just your regular music, which is played through the DanceBot’s speaker. The right channel is replaced with digitally-encoded dance moves. These are sent to a small computer, which interprets them as motor and light commands that instruct your DanceBot how to rock around the clock!

The electronic roadmap

A schematic is a drawing that shows us how electronic components connect together and where they are placed on the printed circuit board (PCB, the picture below). If you, like most people, don’t have the ability to print a circuit board, don’t worry, prototyping boards will work just fine!

For the DanceBot’s workshop (taking place yearly in the Swiss town of Fiesch), we have circuit boards printed for the students. But don’t worry, prototyping boards will work just fine!

Before we start assembling the electronics, it’s important to know how to read the DanceBot’s schematic. You can download the schematics for this project here. Below you will find a list of common elements, which you can identify on the schematic and on the PCB.

Component Type	Measurement Unit	Symbol	Picture
Resistor	Ohm (Ω)
Capacitor (polarized)	Farad (F)
Capacitor (not polarized)	Farad (F)
Light Emitting Diode (LED)	–

Now take a look at the schematic. Notice that beside each symbol in the schematic is a name (black) and a value (blue). The Name helps to identify the location of a part on the PCB (the picture above), while the value identifies the value of the part, as described in the table above.

Each component on an electrical schematic typically has a name (black) and a value (blue). Here, the name is C1 and its value is 100 nano-farads (nF).

In addition to name and value, some parts have a polarity. Be careful! This means you need to put them in the right way, otherwise things won’t work and could get damaged! Diodes have a polarity, and in this project some capacitors have a polarity too. In the next tutorial, where you will assemble the DanceBot’s electronics, we will warn you of any components with a polarity.

That’s it for now

In the next two tutorials, we will put together the DanceBot’s electronics, and then build its body and program some funky moves. If you would like to follow along in future tutorials, you’ll need to organize a few things. You’ll need to:

Download the components list and buy the (few) components for the MP3 DanceBot Kit
Make the mechanical base template
Organise a soldering iron, solder, a hot glue gun, a multimeter and some side-cutters

If you don’t know where to start with these steps, a friend with electronics experience will definitely be able to help!

Once you have organized the above, take some time to learn how to solder and learn how to use a multimeter to check connections.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jLt_xbyYq8Y

Stay tuned for the second tutorial!

Getting Started in Robotics, with Erin Kennedy

Sabine Hauert — Fri, 04 Oct 2013 12:44:24 +0000

Link to audio file (22:28)

In this episode, Sabine Hauert talks with Erin Kennedy at the Open Hardware Summit at MIT. Kennedy is famously know as RobotGrrl, the self-made roboticist and proud maker of the RobotBrrd, Buddy 4000 and BotBait. Starting at age 13, she taught herself programming, electronics, pcb design and mechanical engineering. She’s been sharing her passion for robotics through her blog and weekly G+ Hangout Robot Party that brings together robot enthusiasts to share their latest contraptions. She’s now bringing her work to the next level with robot kits commercialized through indiegogo last year and funded at 151%.

In the long term, Kennedy dreams of making robots creatures with their own personality and robo-culture.

Erin Kennedy is a maker and app developer based in Montreal, Canada. For years she has been documenting her quest to build social robots. Her main robot, RoboBrrd is an animatronic character designed to help kids learn about robotics. Her work has been featured in her RoboBrrd build-a-long video series, on Instructables, at many Maker Faires (Maker Faire NYC Editors Choice Award) and in mainstream media including WIRED and Forbes. Erin has also mentored a FIRST robotics competition team since 2009.

Links:

Classroom robotics: Motivating independent learning and discovery

Sharon Marzouk — Thu, 03 Oct 2013 21:43:54 +0000

Sharon Marzouk with a class of excited youngsters and their Thymio-based creations.
Sharon has found classroom robotics is an excellent motivator for independent learning and discovery: “The way I see it, if we can get kids programming robots at the age of seven, by the time they are in high school and beyond, they’ll be doing something even more amazing.”

With a background in mechanical engineering and an interest in design, engineering and working with kids, I happened into robotics education – and now I’ve been happily teaching and involved for five years.

I started out teaching Lego Mindstorms at a creative, after-school robotics program called Wizbots. After three years of teaching Lego Mindstorms to over 1000 kids, I had a good idea of its advantages and disadvantages. The advantages? Durable and great for the imagination. The disadvantages? If you weren’t an expert LEGO builder it’s a bit intimidating, it’s expensive, and you are stuck in a graphical programming world with no easy transition to learn real programming.

After three years of teaching, I started working with the robotics company Willow Garage to design an exhibit for The Tech Museum with the $400,000 PR2 robot. I helped design the software and interactive experience that had guests from 2 years to 99 years programming the robot. Guests created and saved poses by moving sliders, and then saw their code being composed in real time. We saw everything from the PR2 dancing the Macarena to performing Shakespeare.

I loved the fact that the PR2 inspired kids to get into robotics and lessened the intimidation of programming – it’s too bad that PR2’s size and price tag makes it impossible for a user to continue the learning experience at home. Fortunately, it was also at Willow Garage that I first came across the Thymio II robot and one of the involved researchers from EPFL. I immediately took a liking to this cute and personable little robot, with its 20 sensors and 39 LED. With such personality, I automatically assigned a gender, so from now on if I refer to a ‘he’, please understand that I am referring to the Thymio II, and know that I’ve also had kids decide that the Thymio is really a ‘she’.

I had a hunch that this would be a hit among kids and an excellent teaching tool for robotics. The first time I brought Thymio to the classroom, I gave a presentation about robotics, and boy did the kids FLIP when I took out Thymio. All of the kids excitedly exclaimed, “YOU HAVE A ROBOT, IN YOUR BAG?!”

The first time I took Thymio into a classroom was for my interview with Woodland School. After seeing such excitement from both the kindergarteners and 5th graders, I was pulled into work for Woodland as their Instructional Technology Coordinator for K-8th grade and to create a curriculum around Thymio.

What I love about the Thymio is its adaptability – I’ve been able to teach with it at every age level, from K-8 in the classroom. Thymio has all components in one, and many pre-programmed modes. For kindergarten we can talk about motors and sensors, and behaviors. The kids will create interactive animals by building off of Thymio with LEGO and other arts and crafts and then use the pre-programmed behaviors.

For the students who are around 8-10 years Thymio has been a great tool to teach experimentation, technology, critical thinking, programming, invention, teamwork, design, building … and I could go on and on. The visual programming language composes code in real time and creates a nice bridge to written code. I ran a successful summer camp where I was able to easily teach programming iterations and code writing to kids as young as seven.

Seeing such success in the classroom has motivated me to create a curriculum for other teachers so that they may be able to receive a box of robots and, with the help of an online curriculum, to then be able to start teaching a class. That is the reason why I started TechyKids. The best part about all of this is that the Thymio is a robot that, after some initial guidance, will motivate kids to learn and experiment themselves. Today was (another) perfect example of this – I helped with some troubleshooting for a 4th grade class, who were getting started with Thymio, but after that the kids were fully engrossed in their own work.

Some of the casual side conversations were as follows:

Student #1: “Oh, I think I know!”
Student #2: “Why?”

Student #3: “Now, I wonder how I can get him to sense a cliff…”

Female Student #1: “I love Technology.”

Student #4: “I found a way to make him blush.”
Student #5: “How did you do that?”

Female Student #2: “Would you rather have more PE or Technology?”
Female Student #3: “Technology, definitely”

What I loved about the Thymio-inspired conversations is that they came out naturally. Kids were asking why, collaborating, helping each other, and were passionate about their work. Classrooms everywhere have been yearning for this kind of a result, and I feel fortunate to have come upon a product that can produce such fulfilling results. The way I see it, if we can get kids programming robots at the age of seven, by the time they are in high school and beyond, they’ll be doing something even more amazing.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9hIyN7AKF-4

Classroom robots: A great way to get young people started

David Peins — Wed, 02 Oct 2013 20:46:14 +0000

“The Project” – David Peins’ first classroom robot.

“How did you get started in robotics?” is a question that people often ask when they meet me and I am surrounded by my robots. This past weekend I was at Maker Faire in New York City and I met hundreds of children and their parents, hobbyists, tinkerers and curious adults who said that they have always wanted to build a ‘Robot,’ but did not know where to start. During the two day show, I presented some of the robots that I have built over the last fifteen years and some of my young students joined me to explain how they got started in robotics and to show the robots that they built with me in my PIC Robotics classes. I got started building robots because I had a problem that I believed robots could solve.

I first became interested in robotics by reading science fiction stories that described very intelligent, highly functional robots. I wanted to build my own real autonomous robot that would follow me around and help me out, like the ones in the stories I was reading, but I did not know where to begin. I put off building robots for many years until I was presented with a context that seemed like the perfect application. I then started building mechanisms, electronic control circuits and finally embedded controllers and software to enable my robots to autonomously respond to changes in their environment.

What was my context? I needed to find a way to teach electronics to high school kids who were not motivated and took my class because they were told that “Electronics will be fun!” Robotics is a rich context for teaching and learning many academic subjects but especially mechanical engineering, electronics, and computer science. Most of the kids that I taught were hyperactive, lacking in prerequisite science and math classes, had very limited academic skills and could not even read at grade level. They were looking for the easiest class to fill an elective requirement and many did not even know what electronics was and took the class because of suggestions of their guidance councilors or parents. I needed a carrot to dangle to get my students to begin to want to learn and to start asking the right questions.

How did I do it? I started with model rockets because I had built them before and because the materials were available. The student’s first challenge was to build a tracking device as a payload for their rocket. I was looking for a project that all of my kids would be able to build so I had to modify this to, ‘any circuit that does something and is still functioning when the rocket is recovered.’ The problem was that, because of the weight of the primary cell batteries powering the circuits, the rocket motors required to safely launch the projects sent the rockets outside the ‘design window’ and onto neighbors’ roofs and into their pools. I discontinued the rocket projects and, after a series of projects that I thought were interesting, (a grip-strength tester, a reaction timer, a cricket, a laser tripwire and others,) I decided to build a robot.

Robotics is a rich context for teaching and learning many academic subjects but especially mechanical engineering, electronics, and computer science.

My first classroom robot was called “The Project.” It was a rotating platform inside a clear acrylic tube powered by a DC motor that could rotate in either direction. I mounted a laser pointer to the platform so that it projected light out of the cylinder in a circular pattern parallel to the ground. Students had to create a circuit that would cause the motor to rotate in such a way that the laser pointer was always aimed at the light. I told the class that a “Client who wished to remain anonymous,” had asked me, as the teacher of this “class of exceptional students,” to find a way to keep a “Non-Lethal” laser aimed at a “Really bright light.” I had just read Orson Scott-Card’s “Enders Game” and the premise, which I kept to myself, was that there were alien creatures that gave off a really bright light and we needed to invent a way to keep our defenses aimed at them with some robotic targeting system. To maintain a sense of urgency and realism, when students asked why they were doing this project, I would answer, “That is classified.” If I wasn’t sure if a particular method or component would meet the requirements for my academic goals for the class, I would answer, “I will have to ask the client,” which would give me time to think through the implications. I maintained a commitment to the premise and to this day, my students realize that there probably was no secret client, but they felt like they were part of some real project which, of course they were! So, I think that whether robots walk, roll, spin, emote, or whatever autonomously, and if they have a purpose and solve a problem, then they are real. I realized too, that all humans have a subconscious drive to create life, robots seem to be alive and on some level satisfy this need; especially in adolescents.

To summarize, I got started in robotics because I had a problem to solve – I needed a context for teaching a complex subject to unmotivated students. I think that the most important thing that you can do to get started in robotics is to have a context; a really good reason for building a robot that will solve a problem and let the form of the robot be decided by the function. Many of the people that I meet think that robots are so cool and they want to ‘Do Robotics,’ but they really don’t have a specific reason in mind. Robotics contests all have a problem that contestants need to solve and the robot may take many different forms. I think that before you start to build a robot, you should have an application or a task for your robot and you have to ask yourself, “Will this robot be able to solve my problem?” Because robotics is a combination of mechanisms, electronics and computer logic, many people feel that they cannot be expert in everything so avoid robotics as a hobby. If you have some skills in one of the three but are lacking in others, there are plenty of mechanical kits, so that you don’t have to build a mechanism, many different ready-made electronic circuit boards for robotic control and even open-source code, pre-written to control robots. By starting with basic electronics, you will be able to connect more circuits to your project and successfully troubleshoot problems when things don’t work as they are supposed to. Wherever you decide to start working with robotics, there are plenty of resources and people who are willing to help when you do run into a problem, including me! I look forward to hearing from you.

Students hope their ship inspection robot will significantly reduce dry-dock time for maritime transport industry, improve safety for inspectors

Florian Berlinger — Mon, 30 Sep 2013 04:35:35 +0000

Students take a research tour with Damen ship repairs in Rotterdam.

A team of students from ETH Zurich and ZHdK have developed a prototype for a robotic ship inspection unit that is capable of conducting visual inspections of ship ballasts. Ballast inspection – which involves navigating hard-to-reach spots with no line of sight, often in the presence of intense heat, humidity, and hazardous gases – is normally done by human inspectors, and represents a significant cost to ship-owners who must pay for dry-docking and who face lost income when they cannot operate their ships during the inspection period. Because robotic ship inspection can occur while the ship is in operation, it could significantly reduce dry-dock time. The Ship Inspection Robot (SIR), which was developed in conjunction with Alstom Inspection Robotics and which uses magnetic wheels to navigate the I-beams and other awkward obstacles found inside ship ballast, is relatively compact and does not require any cables for power or communication, and thus offers significant mobility improvements over other robotic ship inspection prototypes. Project leaders anticipate that a per unit production cost could be as low as €4K, enabling shipping companies to operate several units in parallel as an additional time-saving measure. The robot was developed as part of a Bachelor-level project that aims to give students practical experience and promote contacts with industry.

Cargo ships, which transport everything from bananas, coffee, grain, coal, heavy equipment, chemicals, oil and gas, are the backbone of intercontinental trade, and the shipping industry represents an annual estimated average of more than €300bn worldwide. According to the International Shipping – Facts and Figures report published by the International Maritime Organisation, there were 103 392 commercial ships in service by January 2011. With an average age of 19 years and an expected lifespan of 25 years, regular inspection and repair is an important part of the global fleet maintenance.

The mechanical stress of loading and unloading, and the corrosive properties of seawater all take their toll on a vessel’s structure. This is especially true for a ship’s ballast tanks, which are filled with seawater to compensate for weight changes as cargo is loaded and unloaded. Located between the outer hull and the cargo holds, and consisting of beams and stiffeners separated by bulkheads, ballast tanks form much of a ship’s supporting structure.

The surface of ballast tanks is subject to saltwater exposure and algae accumulation, and as a result, must be inspected for damage every five years. A standard visual inspection, which can only be conducted with the ship in dry-dock after about a two-day venting period, serves as a kind of triage for determining what repairs are needed, and where. During inspection and repair, time is of the essence. Ship owners must pay for every day in dry-dock (€16K to €25K per day) and, in addition, they face loss of income when goods cannot be transported (€16K – €50K or more per day, depending on the value of the goods; oil and its derivatives, for example, can double in value within weeks in the event of a oil crisis).

Visual inspection is normally carried out by humans; however, intense heat and humidity, and hazardous gases make ship inspection a difficult and dangerous task. Ballast inspection is therefore an ideal task for robots, but the inside of the ballast, which has both convex and concave edges, as well as T-, L-, bulb- and I-profiles, presents a significant navigation challenge for any robotic inspection system. A few prototypes have been developed to date, however most of these systems have been large and heavy, and have required cables (for communication and power) that significantly limit their range and mobility.

Workers repairing a ship in a dry-dock. Note the newly painted piece: it is often necessary to cut a hole into the hull to gain access to an area inside the ship.

Inside the cargo hold of a bulk carrier.

Ballast tank of the same ship, showing the kinds of structures the robotic inspection system must climb.

Structural features inside the ship, like T- and I-profiles, pose an additional mobility challenge to the robotic inspection system.

The project
SIR was developed as part of an industrial-academic collaboration between Alstom Inspection Robotics, ETH Zurich and ZHdK. Alstom Inspection Robotics proposed a project that would result in a lightweight, low-cost robot for inspecting ships and similar structures, and provided some of the technology; a team of ten undergraduate students (six mechanical engineers and two electrical engineers from ETH Zurich, and two industrial designers from ZHdK) completed the project from concept to functional prototype as part of a nine-month bachelor-level focus project.

Developing the inspection scenario

Touring a shipyard helped students develop a scenarios for how a ship inspection robot could be used.

In order to research the state-of-the-art of the ship inspection process, we went to a shipyard in Rotterdam to interview ship owners, inspectors, and maintenance workers, and to explore the inside of bulk carriers — SIR’s eventual workplace. This visit helped us to understand everyone’s priorities, how an inspection robot might be used to address them, and allowed us to develop, together with Alstom Inspection Robotics, a realistic potential inspection scenario that would serve as a guide for SIR’s eventual design. Here is the scenario we came up with:

As part of a round-the-year continuous inspection, the ship owner decides to use a four-day cruise to inspect part of the ballast tank. The inspection area is split into sections 3m wide and 50m long, which are bordered by stiffeners that can be climbed, but which limit sight. Calculations done on power consumption suggest a run time of about three hours; with an assumed average speed of 4.5 cm/s (calculated as a weighted mix of maximum and obstacle speed), ten of these sections could be inspected on a single battery charge.

Once inspection is complete, the data is analysed and suspicious areas are marked. Available data from earlier inspections is used to detect changes, and the damage map is updated. The next time a ship is due for inspection, the damage map is checked, and necessary equipment and material are ordered before the ship even enters the dry dock.

Once in dry dock, the ship is vented and known repairs begin without delay at the same time as small or complexly shaped areas (like the bow) are manually inspected. A full inspection is shifted to the end of the dry-docking: since the inspectors already have access to the data, they can identify critical problems in advance and shorten the time they spend inspecting undamaged areas.

The prototype

SIR’s overlapping wheels enable it to climb very thin obstacles without detaching.

The focus project resulted in a prototype for a relatively small, cable-less robotic ship inspection system that we call the Ship Inspection Robot (SIR). The prototype uses magnetic wheels to crawl along the metal ballast surface; SIR is controlled by a human inspector via wireless transmitter, and a powerful battery allows for approximately three hours of run time on a single charge. We envision that future prototypes will be able to map damaged areas. Below are some of SIR’s most important features:

Continuous inspection for early damage detection
Because, unlike its human counterparts, SIR is immune to poor air quality and does not require scaffolding to climb, inspection could be undertaken while the ship is cruising. It could thus be used as part of an on-going year-round inspection program, allowing ship owners to identify and monitor suspicious areas, and order materials and plan repairs ahead of a scheduled dry-docking. While SIR is not meant as a replacement for a human visual inspection, it would allow human inspectors in dry-dock to focus on damaged areas, and on areas that are not accessible by robot, such as the ship’s bow.
Low cost of entry
Because of its structural simplicity and its use of relatively inexpensive peripheral equipment, the target per-unit production cost of a commercially produced version of SIR is expected to be about €4K, allowing ship-owners or their subcontractors to treat them as a consumable rather than an asset. This low cost would allow operators to own and operate several units in parallel. The prototype cost about €12K to produce.
Low degree of autonomy
Conceptually, SIR has a low degree of autonomy. Ship inspections are carried out according to very strict regulations and procedures, leaving no margin for errors, and one way to reduce errors is to keep things simple. This feel of being ‘in control’ also increases market acceptability.

How it works

The ship inspection robot’s magnetic wheels can carry up to 240kg.

SIR features four overlapping magnetic wheels, which allow the unit to maintain continual contact with the ship’s surface, even as it navigates sharp angles, vertical surfaces and overhangs. A gamepad allows the human operator to control the device, and a top-mounted camera and lighting system allow for visual inspection. The robot has almost no on-board computing power, making it lightweight and power efficient; almost all processing and control tasks (with the exception of a micro-controller for bundling sensor data) are executed on a base station that runs the Robot Operating System.

The robot uses four Sharp infra-red distance sensors for edge and obstacle detection, and an Invensense MPU 6050 IMU provides the operator with orientation data. These sensors are currently only used for user feedback. The camera used on the robot is a GoPro Hero 3 where it serves as a demonstrator for a visual sensor. It is assisted by three lights, one pointing in the viewing direction while the other two illuminate the ground in a flat angle, so as to make bumps and small edges more visible thanks to the longer shadow they cast on the ground.

Communication is carried out by two systems. The first system is an analogue wireless device. It uses the same 2.4GHz frequency as normal WLAN devices, however the signal is analogue, giving it more stability. It can be exchanged for an ethernet cable at any time. This device is used to control the robot, since delay through this channel is barely perceivable. The second system is a wireless video transmitter for the GoPro camera that is often used in model airplanes.

Parts overview. Reduction in complexity is an important part of the industrialisation process.

Top view of SIR’s electronics compartment.

Side view of the ethernet switch in SIR’s electronics compartment.

As a demonstrator, we installed a camera and a pan/tilt mechanism as well as a light for illumination.

Performance
Working as part of an interdisciplinary team and organising a project all at once was certainly a challenge, however SIR proved itself to be a successful focus project. Not only did SIR perform as planned, it also showed that the mechanical and electrical design can be integrated into a robust and compact design; this was achieved by working closely together to integrate our various areas of expertise.

Our primary goal was for SIR to be able to overcome obstacles, and thanks to its compact wheelbase, SIR is able to do this with a high reliability, a thing no other robot known to us can do! Overcoming obstacles still needs some work in terms of reliability and smoothness, however, the robot never detached from the surface during a test and, in most cases, was recoverable without interaction from outside. We are proud that we were able to raise the bar in this respect.

So far, tests have shown that many of the other desired tasks can also be fulfilled by the current prototype, such as the ability to carry a variety of sensors.

SIR’s high range of mobility is the key value we added to the state-of-the-art of inspection robots, and thus the biggest achievement of our project. The ability to climb all these additional obstacles is not only beneficial for ship inspection, but also useful for many other robot applications such as power plant inspections.

Further development of SIR lies in Alstom Inspection Robotics’ hands.

Andreas Müller (ITET*), Yorrick Detreköy (MAVT**), Marco Eppenberger (ITET), Florian Berlinger (MAVT), Simon Schmid (MAVT), Michael Fisler (MAVT), Jonas Eichenberger (MAVT), Clemens Clausen (MAVT). Absent: Joël Burgeois, Léonard Ziegler, from ZHdK (Zürcher Hochschule der Künste).
*ITET: ETH Zurich’s electrical engineering department
**MAVT: ETH Zurich’s mechanical engineering department

Links
SIR website
Product Development Group at ETH Zurich
Alstom Inspection Robotics
ZHdK

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Mentors of Steel: The role of mentoring in robotics education

Mike Hamer — Fri, 27 Sep 2013 19:23:29 +0000

The Girls of Steel – a competitive FIRST team located in Pittsburg, PA – is on a mission to draw more young women into engineering. We’ve already heard what it’s like to be part of an all-girls robotics team, we now catch up with the team’s mentors, Theresa Richards and George Kantor, to hear about their roles in inspiring and mentoring the team. Here’s what they have to say …

How and why did you become a mentor?

George: My lab, the Field Robotics Center at CMU, was approached by Patti Rote about creating an all-girls FIRST Robotics Competition Team in the summer of 2010. I have been involved in various K-12 robotics outreach activities dating back to the 90s, and I had always wanted to learn more about FIRST. So I offered to lead the team.

Theresa: I became a mentor because I was very interested in learning more about FIRST robotics and about how I could work with the FIRST program to support and encourage girls in the interdisciplinary field of robotics. The study of robotics includes all STEM fields.

Did you have a mentor when you were growing up? If so, can you tell us about this person and the impact they had on you?

George: Growing up, I had a swimming coach who taught me lessons about setting goals and perseverance. In graduate school and throughout my time as a researcher at CMU I have had a series of mentors who have helped shape my technical career.

Theresa: I had several mentors when I was growing up. Most of my mentors were my high school science teachers who offered opportunities for me to do activities with them outside of school. For example, my biology teacher invited me to participate as his teaching assistant at an evening class he taught. My chemistry teacher helped me get a part-time job and she introduced me to my college – the same one she attended, and my zoology teacher took a group of us on a special field trip and she arranged for an “extra credit” dissection lesson after school. These awesome teachers recognized my interest in science and made sure to offer opportunities. When I think back about it now, I feel so grateful that they took extra time with me. That’s what I try to do for my students.

Do you have any suggestions for teachers or others who may want to get started as a mentor?

George: Just do it! There are plenty of opportunities to mentor young people, and it is an extremely rewarding experience.

Theresa: Other teachers who are interested in finding out about a FIRST robotics team should go to the website and click “What teams and events are located in my area?” I bet they’ll find a robotics program that will welcome them with open arms. If the teacher feels unsure about being a robotics mentor, he/she should attend a meeting or two before making a decision. Working with the students is inspiring because of their interest in creating something and learning so many new things. And it’s amazing to hear a student say, “So that’s why we learned this in math or in physics” or “I never would have considered engineering if I weren’t on this team.”

What’s the hardest part about mentoring?

George: It is important to encourage people to dream big, but on the other hand aspiring engineers often have unrealistic expectations about what they can accomplish. Helping students define achievable goals often involves encouraging them not to pursue some of their more ambitious ideas, and delivering that message in a positive way can be a challenge. I want my students to believe they can do anything, but I also need to teach them to approach their dreams in a realistic way.

Theresa: The hardest part about mentoring – there really isn’t a hard part, except that having meetings during after school hours from 5 pm until 8:30 or later means we have some late nights, especially during the 6-week build season. Mentoring is a rewarding experience on multiple levels. I enjoy the experience of working together with students, and colleagues and parents who have similar interests of encouraging girls in STEM fields. Like they say in FIRST, “It’s the hardest fun you’ll ever have” – that goes for mentors as well as students.

Do girls need female role models?

George: Yes. It is inspiring for girls to see women in the roles they aspire to, especially in fields like computer science and engineering that are currently dominated by men.

Theresa: Girls need female role models in STEM fields in order learn about various careers and to be able to see themselves in various positions or careers in STEM fields. Girls also benefit from belonging to a network or group of girls who share similar interests while in high school, college, and beyond.

Which students should participate in robotics competitions?

George: All students, especially those with technical interests. Robotics competitions are easily accessible, and they provide an opportunity to learn valuable technical skills in a fun way. They also provide an opportunity to learn life skills that are useful regardless of what career they decide to pursue: teamwork, goal setting, time management, etc.

Theresa: I believe all girls will benefit in some way from joining the Girls of Steel or another FIRST robotics team. The level of the benefit will depend on their level of participation. Participation on the Girls of Steel FIRST robotics team can range from 4 to 20 hours a week during the year. The number of hours depends on the “season” – preseason, build season or competition season – and on a girl’s particular role on the team – e.g. leaders spend time preparing for team meetings and have additional leadership meetings to attend. Why do you recommend robotics competitions for everyone? Not only do the students apply what they’ve learned in computer science, math, science, and engineering classes they also learn that it can be fun to work hard. They learn so much about themselves by being a part of the team. For example, I’ve heard girls say things like “only girls on the team understand why I like ….”, “I found my best friends on the team”, “now I know the difference between a personal goal and a team goal” , “ Only you get my jokes,” and more.

There are many robotics competitions for students. Why FIRST?

George: I really like FIRST’s approach to competition. Winning is important, but greater importance is placed on cooperation and professionalism. FIRST has invented words that capture this spirit and are central to everything that FIRST does: “coopertition” and “gracious professionalism”. In addition, FIRST goes to extra efforts to make its events exciting. The games are well designed, with attention paid to making the matches interesting to watch. The competitions are narrated by professional emcees and the field set-up has a high production value. The result is something that is a cross between a rock concert, a sporting event, and a science fair.

Theresa: I really don’t know much about other competitions except that some involve “fighting robots” rather than “game playing robots,” and the robots vary in size. FIRST® (USFIRST.org) is an organization that promotes robotics competitions for all ages that involve more than just a robot. Our team competes at the FRC (FIRST Robotics Competition) level that involves designing and building a 120 lb. robot over a period of 6 weeks to play a game with 5 other robots on the field. The awards structure of FIRST promotes other aspects of the team – like fundraising (to raise money for registration fees), outreach, teamwork, public speaking, leadership, media, and more. We’ve found that having a FIRST team seems to be like running a business with students having the opportunity for major leadership roles. High School level FIRST teams are encouraged to support STEM awareness for younger people in the community. Publishing Lynn’s comic about the 2012 FRC season on our website and on Robohub is just one way the Girls of Steel FIRST robotics team contributes toward that goal.

Thank you both very much for your time, and best of luck to you and the Girls of Steel in future competitions!

Getting into the driver’s seat: Girls of Steel tell us how they got hooked on robotics

Mike Hamer — Thu, 26 Sep 2013 11:48:55 +0000

Girls of Steel at the 2013 FIRST Championships. Photo credit: Walt Urbina.

The Girls of Steel – a competitive FIRST team located in Pittsburg, PA – is on a mission to draw more young women into engineering. We asked team members Mackenzie Ferris (16), Sylvie Lee (16), Molly Urbina (15), Lynn Urbina (17), and Becca Volk (15) to give us the inside scoop of what it’s like to be part of an all-girls robotics team. Here’s what they have to say …


Lynn Urbina Age: 17 Grade: 12 Years on GoS: 3 Technical Sub-Team: Mechanical	Mackenzie Ferris Age: 16 Grade: 11 Years GoS: 3 Technical Sub-Team: Programming	Molly Urbina Age: 15 Grade: 10 Years on GoS: 2 Technical Sub-Team: Mechanical


Rebecca (Becca) Volk Age: 15 Grade: 10 Years on GoS: 2 Technical Sub-Team: Electronics	Sylvie Lee Age: 16 Grade: 11 Years on GoS: 3 Technical Sub-Team: Programming

How did the “Girls of Steel” form as a team?

Lynn: In the summer of 2010, one of our founding mentors, Patti Rote, wanted to create an all girls FIRST® (For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology) robotics team in Pittsburgh. Patti asked George Kantor, of the Field Robotics Center at Carnegie Mellon University, to help. In the fall of 2010, Girls of Steel FIRST robotics team 3504 was formed with about twenty girls. This year is our fourth year and we expect to have around forty girls on our team.

Was this your first introduction to robotics?

Mackenzie: Yes. I didn’t do anything robotics-related until I joined.

Becca: No. I did FLL (FIRST® Lego League, a division in FIRST® Robotics for younger children) and was on a different robotics team before joining. Girls of Steel is a different level of robotics that my other teams.

Lynn: Sort of. I did some Lego Robot Kits when I was in middle school, but that was all.

Sylvie: I was interested in computer science because my mom is a computer scientist, but I didn’t do anything robotics-related until joining the team.

Molly: No, but I did some Lego Robotics when I was younger and attended Tech Nights (a program in Carnegie Mellon University that aims to get middle school girls into technology).

What were some technical challenges that you faced with FIRST, and how did you solve them?

Becca: Electronic boards often don’t fit on the robot due to changes we’ve made, so we have to rearrange the electronics in order to fit them on the boards. Other times, electronics just don’t work, so we have to replace them. Usually we find out about broken electronics after we put them on.

Lynn: I had to create a square hole with a mill; a mill is a machine that usually drills round holes, but I had to make a square hole. In order to do this, I had to learn about a new drill bit, do a lot of math and then drill the hole. After drilling the hole, I discovered I had drilled it to the left by one extra inch. I had to do it all over again!

What is your best experience from being in Girls of Steel?

Mackenzie: Definitely being a driver last year. Before being a driver, I wasn’t in the Pit (the area where we work on our robot during competition) as often as I wanted to be, and therefore wasn’t as involved. As the driver, not only did I get to drive the robot, I was in the middle of all the action and I really knew what the team was doing.

Becca: My favorite moment was ‘bag and tag day’ (the final day to work on your robot) with Watson, our 2012 robot. We accomplished a lot that day. The Great Migration (when all the electronics are moved from one position to another in 3 hours) was the night before … programmers were programming until five in the morning, and then we still needed to fix things mechanically. It was a hectic day, but we were efficient, productive and got it finished.

Lynn: Two years ago I was the driver, and I had to practice four hours or more each day for the few weeks leading up to championships. At the championships we were mediocre in the rankings, which made me a little disappointed because I put so much work into practicing. My spirits were lifted when I found out that we were the number one balancer (an aspect of the game where the robot had to balance on a bridge) in our division, and in the top twenty in the entire competition of four hundred teams.

Sylvie: My best experience was getting to work in the Pit. When I was working on the robot in the Pit, I got a huge adrenaline rush. All of us were working together quickly and it was really exciting.

Molly: Welding is my favorite. I never had to deal with hot metal before and after burning my hand once, I learned not to get near hot tools without proper safety equipment. Welding is still really fun, even after the burn.

Any fun anecdotes?

Sylvie: Programming jokes! I have so many! One is, “Oh, I’m out of your scope”.

Lynn: Ha! I get it!

Molly: I don’t get it.

Sylvie: A variable can be out of a scope, or out of certain curly brackets, so parts of the program can ‘see’ it. The expression basically means, “I’m out of your league,” in programming language. And then there are the comment out fingers //: “I can no longer see you.”

Becca: I saw a comic of two guys sword fighting and their boss comes in and asks, “Why aren’t you working?” They responded, “Our code’s compiling.”

Sylvie: That’s so true!

Mackenzie: Drive team practice. Period. We have such a blast! Once I was practicing with my phone, with one hand holding my phone and the other controlling the joystick, and Lynn scolded me. Then another time Molly set up cones so close together that I knocked down them all with the robot.

Becca: During the night of the Great Migration I drank four bottles of Mountain Dew. Not cans, bottles. I first crashed, then after ten minutes I was so hyper. I was up until 2am working on the robot, and then I came home and realized I didn’t write a paper that was due the next day. I wrote it, then got to bed at four 4am.

Sylvie: That’s an impressive feat for two hours.

Becca: I know! The thing with procrastination: it takes eight hours to get thirty minutes of work done, but it takes thirty minutes to get eight hours of work done.

Molly: One time another welder and I were behind the welding curtain (a curtain to protect other’s eyes). We were trying to get our mentor’s attention so we were moving the unfinished heart-shaped chassis above the curtain. When that didn’t work, we moved it around while yelling his name.

Lynn: There was the time I broke the Chrome Book screen and Sylvie had to work with colors.

Sylvie: Oh yeah! My mother was teaching me how to use the Chrome Book after the screen cracked and her instructions, literally, were: “Click CTRL+A, wait until the screen turns light purple, and then continue. If the black crack by the left corner flickers, that means you have done it wrong, restart the computer.” It was so bizarre!

Lynn: That’s gold!

If you could build any robot, what would it do?

Becca: Fly.

Molly: A chore robot because I really don’t like chores. Or a robot that can use my face to figure out what food I want to eat, like in Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy.

Sylvie: Something that can get me places without me moving. I have a thing about moving. Or a cooking robot, I like food.

Lynn: A robot that can map the ocean floor and can identify new species of fish. There are robots that map the sea floor, but I want to create one that can identify new fish.

What do your friends at school think about you being part of a robotics competition? Do they “get” it?

Lynn: I’m cyber-schooled so I don’t know many of my classmates, but my friends think it’s nice. They don’t understand why I spend so much time on it though. Robotics isn’t just a hobby, it becomes a lifestyle.

Mackenzie: At my first school, my friends would tease me about it in a kind way, but they thought it was really cool. In my second school, my friends thinks it’s cool and interesting.

Becca: I always talk about it and my teachers and friends think it’s cool. They like it, but they don’t think they would want to do it. Some of my friends have come to our competitions, too. That was really fun.

Molly: My teachers love it, but my friends call it a ‘nerdy thing’. A few of my friends understand, but they don’t want to come to competitions. It’s okay though; I enjoy it and that’s what really matters.

Sylvie: My friends know it’s a big part of my life and that it’s a huge time commitment, but they don’t know too much about it. They just know that it’s about robotics.

Has it made a difference for you to be part of an all-girl team? Would it be the same if your team were co-ed?

Becca: My other team was a coed team and was run differently. Many times the boys took mechanical jobs, so girls did more of the business tasks, even though we all got to build the robot. In Girls of Steel it’s different. We’re more open. I also think we are more connected because it’s an all-girls team. Even though we’re stubborn, we depend on each other. Also, girls have a similar mindset, so we understand why we do certain things better.

Molly: We can speak our minds easily because we are all girls, but we have more drama.

Sylvie: We are dramatic, but not in a normal way.

Becca: Its drama in a very robotics way.

Sylvie: Things like, “My design wasn’t used,” or “I didn’t get to work on this part.” Even, “Why wasn’t she here working on the robot?” It’s really funny because it isn’t about boys or the classic drama. There is also some bitterness between the programmers and the mechanical girls that appears once in a while. It’s more because we are a bit stubborn and each one of us has our own view of the robot.

Becca: In the end, the robot is a mesh of all the girls’ ideas.

Sylvie: Also, if there were boys, I wouldn’t feel as comfortable. When it’s all girls, we know each other really well because we do a lot together … mainly eating.

Mackenzie: It would be different on a coed team. On some other coed teams girls do business, guys do the mechanical work. It’s unfair. Also, I took a class for engineering and, although the teacher was good, he favored the boys.

Lynn: Girls of Steel is a family. We have all our sisters, plus our mentors who are like uncles, aunts, older brothers and sisters to us. It really is a family, and I think it’s because of the culture we have.

What would you say to other girls who are curious about robotics but who aren’t sure if it’s for them, or who don’t know how to get started?

Molly: Come to the dark side, we have robots and cookies.

Becca: Honestly, try it. Google ‘robotics’, or look up different teams and research things you have heard.

Lynn: Get a Lego Robot Kit. You can build robots out of Lego, and it is simple programming. If you want to get more advanced, buy an Arduino. It has a reasonable price, plus you can find a lot of tutorials online for using other devices with the Arduino. Also look for teams around the area, including FIRST® teams, VEX teams and Battle Bots teams.

Sylvie: For programming, there are a lot of internships and others opportunities if you look for them. Some of them aren’t robotics-related, but still try programming. There is nothing to be afraid of … there is nothing to lose.

Mackenzie: Join a team to see what it is like. There is something for everyone, even if you don’t think there is anything for you. If there are any robotics events around town, go to them. Also, go to competitions nearby and talk to people … you never know who you will meet.

My pathway to robotics

Jaidyn Edwards — Wed, 25 Sep 2013 12:56:11 +0000

My name is Jaidyn Edwards. I am eighteen years old and live in South Australia. For me, being interested in robotics was part of an evolutionary process built upon a few core interests I had as a child.

My interest in mechanical things came about from the age of five. I distinctly remember carrying around a little sketchbook with a pencil everywhere I went. Whenever I had an idea for something, I would draw a picture in a page of the book, maybe writing a word or two on what it was. Most of the time these ideas were Rube Goldberg machines designed to do mundane tasks like watering plants or making hot drinks. As I got older and played around more with LEGO Technic, the complexity of these machines and the information I’d write about them increased. By the age of eight I was starting to become more interested in electronics. I loved designing mechanical machines, and with electronics I could make the machines I was designing much more complicated. I began to pull apart my toys due to an insatiable curiosity to see how they worked. My knowledge, of course, was very basic – the only electronic parts I knew of were the ones with a visual function, such as a DC motor or an LED. Even the sketchbooks were getting an electronic overhaul; I remember a few of them had the LCD clock faces on the front cover that I pulled out of my wrist watches.

By the age of ten, the designs I was drawing in my sketchbook were more product designs. I designed phones, watches, cars, computers and even game consoles. The designs had all the key components diagrammed and labelled with labels like ‘CD reader’ and ‘Big board’ (Motherboard). By this stage the designing process became a key interest as I spent more time trying to make the designs look good so that I could show others my work.

I think the step between machines and product designs to robots was due to two key things that were happening during that time. The Star Wars episodes 1-3 were released during my early childhood and, when I was old enough, we hired the DVDs. I was instantly hooked and loved the idea of C3PO. The fact that Anakin made C3PO in order to help his mother specifically seemed to target me, it was like a sign that I needed to do the same.

The other reason I became interested in robotics was actually to do with my cousin. Every Thursday night I would go to his house and play computer games with him. One night I went there and he had this really cool game called Robot Arena 2, in which you design battle bots. The game let you customize everything from the body shape to the internal components and the weapons you used. I spent hours playing this game and absolutely loved it.

I borrowed all the books in my school library that had anything to do with robots (there weren’t many) and started to design robots.

At the age of fourteen my parents bought me the Lego Mindstorms NXT. The NXT was a Lego kit that let you build and program your own robot. I played with it for around two years and had great fun with it, but soon my hobby was going to take a turn for the worse.

I was in high school now and things were getting tough. I was starting to get really stressed at school and began to play video games as a release. Video games quickly took over my life. I would get home from school at 4PM and jump onto my computer to play. I would only get off for tea around 7PM and then get straight back on until I had to go to bed. It was a poisonous cycle and I regret those years of my life as I felt like I achieved nothing. My video game addiction meant I didn’t do any homework and spent no time revising what we covered in class. My grades began to slip and my gaming habit only became worse.

The cycle was only broken when it came to crunch time, Year 12, the final year of high school. I realised what I had gotten myself into and was determined to make it stop. I put my head down and worked like I never had before. My grades picked up dramatically in all subjects but Math. I studied every night and even finished assignments early. Sadly it was too late for Math, I was never good at it when I was young and the period of not doing homework absolutely destroyed any understanding I had on the subject.

During the mid-year break I wanted a new hobby, a hobby that would not only be something challenging like computer games, but also something that would actually benefit me. I remembered how much fun I had designing and making robots and decided it was time to go back to that.

I went online to research other ways I could make robots other than using Lego, that was when I heard of this thing called an Arduino. I didn’t really understand what it was but I bought one called an Arduino Uno. When it arrived in the post I looked up tutorials to see how I could get it to do things.

July 18 2012 I uploaded my first video to YouTube on Arduino. It wasn’t my first creation, but it was the first one that I had recorded. I recorded it on my phone and just uploaded it straight to YouTube. I had uploaded previous videos before on YouTube and thought it would be cool to show off what I had made.

From that point on I recorded all of my creations and uploaded them to YouTube, each time writing a little about them on my blog.

First I covered all the basics, such as making sounds, lighting LEDs in patterns and detecting light changes. When I had used up all the components that came in my starter kit I researched ways to make things move with the Arduino. I found these things called servos and read they were easy to use so I went on Ebay and bought a few of them cheap from Hong Kong. Once I had worked out how to use them I made my first little bot. It was nothing complex and didn’t even have any autonomous capabilities. The robot simply moved the servos to certain positions to make the robot hop like a frog. Money was scarce so I made things out of whatever I could. The body was made of cardboard and the legs were the servo arms with heat shrink over the top to add grip.

I had experience with programming before and I was pretty good at computer software, so once I understood how I could make robots with the Arduino, I began to make them smarter and more complicated.

I became interested in program in particular called GlovePIE. GlovePIE is a program that allows you to program gamepads to act as a keyboard and mouse. I wrote a code that allowed me to have full control of my computer by simply talking, I called it JARVIS.

After programming JARVIS I realised that I could use voice recognition to control the Arduino. To test this theory I made a humanoid robot that was able to express emotions and communicate.

I also learned how to use infrared commands and turned my Arduino into a voice controlled TV remote.

It had only been two months but I absolutely loved making things with Arduino and couldn’t stop. Every time I wanted to learn something new I researched for hours on how to do it and watched so many YouTube videos I used up our internet allowance. I went from controlling a remote control car with my iPhone, to making a webcam that tracked my every movement.

My creations were becoming more and more complicated and the views my videos were getting was increasing. I was getting asked so many questions a day I decided I would start doing tutorials. I was getting more comfortable with YouTube as the response to my creations was positive. I kept making tutorials covering all the basic things you needed to make robots with Arduino.

My robots were starting to get very complicated and had various autonomous capabilities. My friend from school had a big box full of old robot kit parts that he had collected as part of a magazine series, he knew I was interested in robotics so he kindly gave me all the parts. I salvaged everything and turned the brain of the bot into an Arduino.

I began to understand more about the electronics inside robots and my knack for software proved invaluable in my first big robot project.

I had five tutorials released by this stage and they were becoming very popular, with thousands of views. My old physics teacher, who I am good friends with, suggested I come into school and teach the students about robotics. I loved the idea and since then I have been volunteering every Friday during their lunchtime to teach the students about robotics and programming.

I kept making robots and developing new skills. My videos were getting a lot of views now and I had just over five hundred subscribers. I was now recording everything I did, whether it was about robots, making things to help with videos or just me going out to conventions.

I thought it was time now to start making videos focused purely on making robots. I made several videos on the matter and three Instructables on three different bots, Ben, James and Yogy. I realised now that people were really starting to like my creations as my bots had started to win me prizes.

Yogy the yoghurt-tub robot!

After spending a semester at the University of South Australia, studying a bachelor of Mechatronic Engineering, I decided to take a one year deferment. I choose to do this for several reasons. The first major reason was the job prospects. We’d often have people from the field come into lectures and talk with us about what they do. The one thing that I hated about what they all said was that none of them were hands on, they all sat behind a desk and worked for the ‘big man’. As I spent more time volunteering at the school I realized that perhaps teaching is the job for me. I will always love making robots, but sometimes I feel like sitting behind the desk just isn’t for me. Teaching seems to bring my love for robots and the enjoyment I get out of teaching together.

I now have over one thousand subscribers on YouTube and am starting to make of money off of it. Recently, a publishing agent contacted me asking whether I would be interested in producing a video course for them on the subject of ‘Making Arduino Powered Robots’. I agreed to their offer and am working with them now to produce the course.

In the next few weeks I will make the transition from not knowing what to do with my life, to turning my forever interest in robotics into a job. I am going to be an author and also be helping a robotics kit creator in writing a teaching curriculum and helping with instructional videos for his kits. I feel like this is the start of a lifetime journey and I can’t wait to see where robotics takes me.

I don’t know where I am going, but I feel like I am surfing the wave of opportunities. I hope one day to be producing my own kits or perhaps working with the likes of MAKE promoting robotics for kids.

I would also like to mention one last thing. Without the people on LetsMakeRobots.com I probably wouldn’t be where I am now. They are the people who have stood behind me, giving me support and help when I needed it, and have been my slingshot into having a robotics-based career. If you are interested in making your first robot, or have been making robots for a while, go to their site and join. LetsMakeRobots has a great community for both beginners and veterans alike, they have a step by step instructional on how to make your first bot and you can even show off your robotics projects.

I hope you can draw similarities between my story and yours. Remember, stories are ongoing and the more effort you put in, the better your story will be.

Drones for Schools

Matthew Schroyer — Tue, 24 Sep 2013 12:56:32 +0000

To understand what the Drones for Schools program is, and how it came about, it helps to know a few things about my background. I didn’t originally set out to be a STEM educator. I had some science education from studying mechanical engineering as an undergraduate, but eventually wound up with a master’s in journalism. I didn’t think the two halves of my life would merge until I finished my master’s and took a job at a K-12 STEM education grant, at the University of Illinois – they needed someone with a scientific background to handle communications and study the social networks that teachers were forming as part of the grant.

At the time, I was researching how journalists could use aerial robots, commonly called “drones”, to capture data during natural and man-made disasters. As part of this research, I was spending a great deal of time in my basement “hacking” together a small drone from a radio controlled airplane and open-source hardware. It became apparent that this learning experience mirrored what teachers were doing in the STEM grant, and so I approached my boss, a department head in the College of Education one of the co-principal investigators for the grant, with a pitch: let’s have students design, build, and fly drones at our partner schools. He assembled a team of STEM educators to guide the process, and the “Drones for Schools” initiative was born.

Two students collaborate to build a “drone”.

In some ways, the program resembles a nesting doll for concepts in science, technology, engineering and mathematics. A drone is a complex machine, and once you peek inside, one STEM concept leads to another. To design the aircraft, you begin with concepts like Bernoulli’s principle, which when applied through a mathematical formula, determines parameters such as stall speed (how slow the plane can fly before falling out of the sky). Stall speed dictates the power you need to fly, which opens an opportunity to deliver content about electricity and electric motors. And delivering content about electricity and electric motors segues nicely into lessons about battery chemistry and capacity. All the while, students are applying this content knowledge as they make key decisions about how this aircraft will be designed and deployed.

Because this is a semi-autonomous aircraft that is dependent on a small microcontroller, computer programming is interwoven into the Drones for Schools curriculum. Students take this full-function microcontroller, which uses hackable open-source hardware and software, and learn programming by getting it to do some things it wasn’t intended to do. They learn about electronics prototyping by wiring up the microcontroller to external LEDs, and by writing C code to enabe the microcontroller to blink out a Morse code, they learn about variables, arguments, loops, functions, and libraries.

Soldering is one of the many skills that students learn through the Drones for Schools program.

These individual lessons are valuable on their own, but the program’s biggest gains come from students assuming the roles of engineers. This program was designed in part to meet the demands of the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS), which were developed by the National Research Council to help prepare K-12 students for an world where science literacy is increasingly necessary. Perhaps one of the biggest challenges and opportunities presented by NGSS, is the incorporation of engineering education into the K-12 science curriculum, something which hasn’t been attempted on this scale. To help students understand what makes them engineers in the Drones for Schools program, and how that’s different from what scientists do, we’ve had a graduate engineering student explain how engineers make models, design solutions, and test those solutions. The engineering student also provided high school students with information on how their interests in the Drones for Schools program could lead to an education in engineering, and what an engineering career path looks like.

Drones for Schools is just one of around 30 collaborations at the National Science Foundation grant EnLiST, which stands for Entrepreneurial Leadership in STEM Teaching and learning. Each collaboration is unique, but they are all “entrepreneurial,” meaning they draw on resources from other classrooms, university faculty, community organizations, and businesses. Drones for Schools is no different than the other collaborations in the sense that we rely on community partners to provide a useful application for the drone. The drone is not built for the sake of building a drone; rather it is built because it can provide high-resolution images of the ground which can be stitched together in a map. And that data has use for farmers, city planners, researchers, first responders, and many others. Simply put, we think there is a need for drones in the community, and our students are trying to fill that need.

Testing out one of the class’ inventions

AUVSI, the Association for Unmanned Vehicles and Systems International, predicts that 30,000 drones will be flying by 2020, with the majority of those serving as farm equipment. Depending on the definition of a drone, the US may already have exceeded that number. The goal of this program isn’t to ensure that one of our students will engineer one of those drones someday, although technically they’re already building and flying one of those 30,000 when take part of our initiative. Rather, we’re interested in our classroom data, which suggests the initiative increases interest in engineering. And in that sense, I think we’ve succeeded.

UIUC faculty and staff associated with this grant are currently seeking other grants to specifically enrich middle school STEM education. Because of the tremendous learning opportunities packed into these flying robots (some of which are small enough to fly in a classroom), and because of their real-world importance, we believe that drones will be an integral part of STEM opportunities for some time.

Getting started in robotics, an educational concern

Claude Baumann — Mon, 23 Sep 2013 21:40:31 +0000

I am profoundly convinced that if we are able to preserve the natural curiosity of early childhood in growing up individuals, without fail they will develop a durable attraction to science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM). Although this simple recipe seems to be a no-brainer, obviously education encounters insurmountable difficulties in maintaining the precious elementary drive. Once lost, almost therapeutic efforts will be necessary to awake it again.

Ray Almgren, vice-president of marketing at National Instruments, worried in his 2012 NIWeek keynote speech about the problem that:

Somewhere between dropping our kids off at kindergarten and sending them to college, we somehow manage to extinguish their interests in science and engineering. So, how does this happen? Well, there’s a fundamental disconnect of how we do science and engineering in the real world and how it’s taught in the classroom. Not all, but too many educators are pulling a bait-and-switch on our brightest minds by taking away the hands-on exciting projects that got them interested in the first place and replacing it by the theory-only math-based approach that is literally driving out our future innovators in droves.

Anti-math norm

Now, I do not totally agree with Almgren’s analysis that math-based teaching itself should be a vocation-killer. As kids come to adolescence, they naturally develop important cognitive faculties like formal, abstract and hypothetical thinking, processing speed, selective attention, a.s.o., all of which perfectly match with the problems presented in math and physics. In parallel, adolescents dramatically enhance their social skills, and edify their self-esteem, which is essential for their maturation and successful integration into society. However the predominance of social concerns makes them very vulnerable to peer-pressure capable of jeopardizing personal interests for STEM content. For instance, if the clique is submitted to an anti-math norm – as it is often the case in school classes – it will be literally unsexy to be good at math, and initial likes of STEM branches may be seriously compromised.

In his autobiography, Steve Wozniak, a math and science nerd, narrates how much he suffered from such pressure, as he passed from the sixth to the seventh and eighth grades.

Where before I was popular.., suddenly I was socially shut out… It seemed like nobody spoke to me for the longest time. I was in the advanced classes and got good grades… I felt shunned by all these kids who suddenly, and for no reason I could understand, just couldn’t accept me anymore. I did electronics when a lot of others started hanging out and partying and drinking and going out.

Wizardry

Most young people just want to have fun, and they are running scared of being considered as loners. So, why shouldn’t educators try to profit from the same strong psycho-social moments that steer people away from STEM content, and double-cross those undesirable effects? For this purpose a few magic ingredients can be used in order to keep the interest in science and engineering alive beyond puberty: having fun, playing in teams, living some positive rivalry, doing hands-on activities, inventing, hacking, experiencing great rewarding events, sharing stuff with others, meeting stars. During almost 15 years, I consequently deployed these components in a local youth laboratory with various groups of high-school students.

Why robotics?

Because it was possible to find all of the components in the LEGO Mindstorms concept, robotics became the lab’s blockbuster activity after 1998! LEGO is a toy that most kids know from earlier childhood. They associate successful playing with Mindstorms activities, not dreadful failure. They can easily reproduce official models, or thoroughly copy cool robots presented in countless books around the subject. However, the more important quality is that the material is open-ended. Anything can be made of the stuff. It both challenges and fosters creativity, and –unexpected for the LEGO Company at start of the Mindstorms product line— it invites adolescents to go for hardware and software hacking. The latter feature makes the material even more attractive, because doing the impermissible or unorthodox can be irresistible for young people. LEGO sets are designed for boys and girls -although there is a significant male predominance. The Mindstorms concept is tailor-made for project-based learning. Meanwhile there’s a huge world-wide connected community of Mindstorms geeks, clubs and school labs sharing and discussing their projects. There also are contests! Only think of these extraordinary FIRST LEGO League FLL-competitions. I was able to attend a couple these, and the atmosphere was electrifying: young people enjoying collective rivalry that you only experience in sports events.

Stars and events

My students met heroes like Daniele Benedettelli – the guy who made the first LEGO Rubik’s cube solver. A few times they could present their own robots on local RTL TV. They showed humanoid robot GASTON, one of our most ambitious projects, to the Earl of Wessex, the youngest son of Queen Elisabeth II. Their robots crawled over ground, went down to caverns, high to the stratosphere, crossed the sea, and even cruised over Mars –at least over a simulated Mars environment. The online lab journal kept track of the actual developments. This resulted in countless exchanges with interesting people all around the globe. Because of their positive media presence, participants of the robotics lab became little stars within their peer-group.

Challenges

When new participants enter the robotics lab, they are not submitted to annoying introduction lectures. They immediately start with two sorts of hands-on activities. First they follow a few solved exercises, from which they rapidly get the rudimentary knowledge about the material and the LabVIEW programming environment. (Note that we almost exclusively work with this unbeatable graphical software made by NI.) Second, they are challenged in little teams with problems that allow for more than one solution. An easy, although not trivial one is “Driving the Straight Line”. Most young people are accustomed with computer behavior. If they draw a line in a picture editor -a typical open-loop activity-, they expect that an almost perfect line will appear on the screen (to say nothing about pixel-effects). Now, robotics brings back digital processing into the real world… and the students are always stunned, when they see that their robot is driving an arc, although they naïvely programmed it to drive straight. Fred Martin, one of the creators of the first LEGO programmable brick prototype, cuts right the chase of the matter by declaring “Real robots don’t drive straight”. A more elaborate challenge is “Finding the center of a circle”. A circle is duct-taped on the floor; a dual-drive robot is equipped with a single light- or color-sensor. Now, with no other information about the circle, the robot should most precisely find the location of its center. How would you tackle this remarkably difficult exercise?

Projects

Once the participants can handle the LEGO Mindstorms material and the LabVIEW software, they are summoned to decide for a team-project. In his bold article “The Project Method: The Use of the Purposeful Act in the Educative Process”, published in 1918, William H. Kilpatrick described the “project” as “a whole-hearted purposeful act carried on amid social surroundings”. The robotic boat indicated above was the result of a long-term project, to which a group of students was committed… whole-heartedly… They had fun, played in a great team, lived some positive rivalry, did hands-on activities like etching and soldering, invented, hacked, experienced a great rewarding event: when the boat successfully crossed Luxembourg’s biggest lake. They shared their stuff with others, and met stars… the ingredients for making cool robots, and the previously enumerated components for reinvigorating personal interests in STEM content. Many of the attendees of the local youth robotics lab have started their studies in science and engineering. Some have graduated; a few have taken their doctoral degree, and rejoined renowned companies or institutes.

Eureka!

From my experience with the youth lab, getting started with robotics is more a matter of educational methods than of technical aids. If you want to read more about the concept of using LEGO Mindstorms in a youth laboratory, and experience yourself some of these exhilarating moments of Eureka, you should get a copy of my book “Eureka! Problem Solving with LEGO Robotics”, www.ntspress.com, USA, 2013. You also may want to see the lab blog: www.convict.lu/index_r.php

Origami Robots, with Nick Kohut

Matthew Schroyer — Fri, 20 Sep 2013 09:29:25 +0000

Link to audio file (24:09)

In this episode Matthew Schroyer speaks with Nick Kohut, CEO of Dash Robotics, about their foldable hexapod robot and the ongoing crowdfunding campaign to get them into the hands of budding engineers, kids and hobbyists.

Dash is the result of years of research in fast prototyping of bioinspired robots at Ron Fearing’s Biomimetic Millisystems Lab at UC Berkeley (see Fearing Podcast or Hoover Podcast). The palm-sized origami robot is now available for the general public to build and program. The robot takes inspiration from insect locomotion by using compliant and light weight hardware to drive over difficult terrain without using any complex controllers (see Bob Full podcast). You can check out their Dragon crowdfunding campaign for a chance to get one of the first 1000 robots. The campaign ends on October 2nd.

Nick Kohut
Nick Kohut is the co-founder and CEO of Dash Robotics. He is also a postdoc at Stanford University in Mark Cutkosky’s Biomimetics and Dextrous Manipulation Laboratory, working on a variable stiffness suspension element for humanoid robotics. He received his Ph.D. in Mechanical Engineering at the University of California, Berkeley, in Ron Fearing’s Biomimetic Millisystems Lab, developing small legged robots. His research focused on the development of an active tail to enable high speed turning. In the past, he also did research on centimeter scale robots, and using GPS and traffic information to improve fuel economy.

Links:

What is the best way to get a robotics education today? What do you look for when hiring?

RBI Editors — Sun, 15 Sep 2013 15:37:39 +0000

After a (relatively) quiet August, Rohobub is gearing up again this September as everyone in the robotics community heads back to work and school.

This month, as part of our soon-to-launch focus series “Getting Started in Robotics” we decided to ask our panel of experts “What is the best way to get a robotics education today?” And for our readers who are taking the long view to their robotics education, we followed up with “What do you look for when hiring a roboticist?”

Here’s how our panelists weighed in …

Theresa Richards on “What is the best way to get a robotics education today?”

At the high school or middle school level there is no single best way for students to get a robotics education: there are many ways, and each way reaches the students differently. The easiest way is for students to join an established team …

Matthew Schroyer on “What is the best way to get a robotics education today?”

A quality learning experience centered on robotics is hard to find for many students who lack STEM resources through their own schools. Although new science standards hope to improve the situation, K-12 schools are struggling to provide a basic STEM education, let alone opportunities involving more specialized lessons in robotics …

Mark Tilden on “What is the best way to get a robotics education today?”

In the past, a robotics education started with any inspiration that filtered through the sparse media of the time. Imagine a dull illness during a bland winter, black and white TV on a fuzzy channel, and then out of nowhere, mom drops a Jack Kirby ‘Fantastic Four’ comic on your sickbed …

Terry Fong on “What is the best way to get a robotics education today? What do you look for when hiring?”

We look for good people from all over the world who have had some formal education in robotics theory, particularly in the basics of kinematics, perception, and cognition. Many universities offer courses in these areas …

Jonathan Roberts on “What do you look for when hiring a roboticist?”

We are looking for researchers who are highly motivated, and who are passionate about seeing the results of their research come to fruition and be used by industry or the public. They should have a demonstrated ability to conduct internationally-recognized, cutting-edge research in robotics, and have a great publication record …

Nicola Tomatis on “What do you look for when hiring a roboticist?”

We still hire also R&D personnel, but we primarily want to have the best specialists, not necessarily robotics generalists. Of course, we value a background in robotics, but this is not a must …

Robohub focus on robotics education

Mike Hamer — Sun, 15 Sep 2013 15:04:49 +0000

Since posting the call for contributions in August, 2013, I was contacted by many enthusiastic and inspiring individuals who were interested in sharing their experience with budding roboticists.

Starting on September 23rd 2013, Robohub’s focus on robotics education featured original articles and tutorials from educators, students, hobbyists and expert roboticists, with the goal of putting a spotlight on robotics education, and to inspiring budding roboticists of all ages to take the next step in their robotics education.

LINEUP IN BRIEF
Robotics in schools

Self-made roboticists

Educational robots

AISoy Robotics with a behind the scenes look at the development of their AISoy educational robot
Mordechai Ben-Ari with a tutorial on Thymio visual programming
Raymond Oung on how to build a DanceBot

RBI: “What is the best way to get a robotics education today?” and “What do you look for when hiring?”

The following excerpt from Claude Baumann’s article on “Getting started in robotics, an educational concern” sets the scene for the focus series:

For many individuals, somewhere in between childhood and reaching adulthood, the interest for science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) disappears. Although school certainly must assume a significant responsibility for this cancelation, peer-group influences among young people seem to play an even more important role in this undesirable shifting of personal interests. However, by taking advantage of the same psycho-social moments related to adolescence, well-organized LEGO Mindstorms robotics projects, developed in small youth teams may reinforce the penchant for science and engineering, and subsequently arouse vocations for professions in research and technology. Far more than technical concerns, the thorough choice of a valuable methodology decides over success or failure of such projects.
– Claude Baumann, “Getting started in robotics, an educational concern”

Also don’t miss the Robotics By Invitation questions on “What is the best way to get a robotics education today?” and “What do you look for when hiring?”, which were asked in anticipation of Robohub’s focus series on robotics education.