Educational Robotics (Printbots)


research-printbots

Link: GitHub repository

Educational Robotics is the field of study related to teach STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics) disciplines by using robots as educational tool.

Description

Educational Robotics usually involves some mechanics, electronics, and software programming knowledge.

Nowadays, this kind of robots are being used in many schools an universities (Figure 1). Along with the boom of 3d printers, these technologies are emergent tools to do faster prototypes in a cheaper way. Furthermore, Open Source collaborative communities are helping the way to share information and this is producing that this field evolves in much faster than we can perceive.

<b><i>Figure 1</i></b>. Educational robots used in university to teach real-time programming.
Figure 1. Educational robots used in university to teach real-time programming.

Together with my team from CREA Educational Robotics, we are currently researching how educational robots could improve the learning process for teaching children in high-schools. Moreover, we are involved in creating new low-cost modular printable robots - created by 3d printers, as a main platform for teaching. Figure 2 shows the ProtoCREA prototype that is currently being used in several schools in Madrid.

<b><i>Figure 2</i></b>. New modular printable
Figure 2. New modular printable 
robot called ProtoCREA.
robot called ProtoCREA.

Reference papers

  1. Raúl Pérula-Martínez, Juan Miguel García-Haro, Carlos Balaguer, and Miguel A. Salichs. “Developing Educational Printable Robots to Motivate University Students Using Open Source Technologies”. Journal of Intelligent and Robotics Systems. 2015.
  2. Verónica González, Raúl Pérula-Martínez, Félix R. Cañadillas, Miguel A. Salichs, Carlos Balaguer. “Estado de la Tecnología en Robótica Educativa para la Educación Secundaria”. XXXVI Jornadas de Automática. 2015.

About


Personal website of Raúl Pérula-Martínez, Software Engineer and Roboticist. He works at the Robotronica division at Juguetronica Inc., Madrid, Spain.

Raúl has a more than 8-year R&D experience in software and robotics development, working with the most advanced social and humanoid robots out there. He is mainly working on software engineering and machine learning applied to service robotics. His deep knowledge of many programming languages as well as machine learning framework has been mainly used for project management, robotics architecture development, and artificial intelligence.