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Left: Bot'n Roll One A educational robotic platform. Right: RoboParty educational event group picture
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Purpose of Review
With the growing interest for STEM/STEAM, new robotic platforms are being created with different characteristics, extras, and options. There are so many diverse solutions that it is difficult for a teacher/student to choose the ideal one. This paper intends to provide an analysis of the most common robotic platforms existent on th...
Context in source publication
Context 1
... more than a decade of annual events in the same place, it was also realized in different countries as well as in some editions of the RoboCup competition. Figure 1 shows an image of the Bot'n Roll robotic platform specifically developed for RoboParty and a group picture of the participants of the event. ...
Citations
... However, the application of robotic simulations must support transfer to the real robot to test the students' work in real devices and face the issues that arise when moving from simulation to reality, which is still an open issue for pre-university levels [34]. Table I details the previous features in 9 of the most relevant educational robots in the market [35] [36]. They are organized into three main groups. ...
This paper presents the Robobo SmartCity model, an educational resource to introduce students in Computational Intelligence (CI) topics using educational robotics as the core learning technology. Robobo SmartCity allows educators to train learners in Artificial Intelligence (AI) fundamentals from a feasible and practical perspective, following the recommendations of digital education plans to introduce AI at all educational levels. This resource is based on the Robobo educational robot and an autonomous driving setup. It is made up of a city mockup, simulation models, and programming libraries adapted to the students' skill level. In it, students can be trained in CI topics that support robot autonomy, as computer vision, machine learning, or human-robot interaction, while developing solutions in the motivating and challenging scope of autonomous driving. The main details of this open resource are provided with a set of possible challenges to be faced in it. They are organized in terms of the educational level and students' skills. The resource has been mainly tested with secondary and high school students, obtaining successful learning outcomes, presented here to inspire other teachers in taking advantage of this learning technology in their classes.
... Collaborative robotic learning, which takes place with computer support, contributes not only to learning, a robotic app is a motivating activity for students that fosters collaboration between them, has a positive effect on learning and the emotional state of students, when a synergistic effect can be observed between participants in the educational process (Tang et al., 2020;Kerimbayev et al., 2020;Ribeiro & Lopes, 2020;Yang et al., 2020;Ospennikova et al., 2015;Lubold et al., 2021). ...
In the previous study the work experience on organization of teaching Robotics to secondary school students at school lessons and in study groups was introduced. This study which was conducted within 2019 and 2021 covered the period of distant learning caused by COVID-19 pandemic and even post-pandemic period, when a part of school students continued learning online. The study deals with the problem of developing school students’ computational thinking in online learning. We consider computational thinking as a set of cognitive skills of solving educational and cognitive problems. The research questions raised were aimed at solving the problem of the influence of Educational Robotics on developing computational thinking. During the research we have found out that due to the adaptability of robots, Educational Robotics, the development of individual learning programs, and the arrangement of collaborative online learning are instruments and a solution to the problem of developing computational thinking. The main components of computational thinking, which were studied within those 3 years, are the following: algorithmic thinking, ability to program, and efficiency in team work. The influence of the learning strategy we chose enabled us to determine the level of computational thinking and its dependence on learning Robotics. We used statistical criteria in order to summarize the results of our research. The statistics provided suggests progress in the indicator tracked. Based on the experimental data received we approximated reliability (R²) and relevant exponential equation (trend lines). The research we carried out also has led to the general conclusion that Educational Robotics helps to create synergistic learning environment for stimulating students’ motivation, collaboration, self-efficacy and creativity.
... Middle school students are often the focus of these investigations within the context of drone and robotics activities, as research has shown that students at this age-range start to develop interests in STEM and begin to consider career aspirations (Almeda & Baker, 2020). To engage middle school students, drone and robotics education leverages extracurricular events such as competitions, workshops, and after-school programs (Ribeiro & Lopes, 2020). These events have been successfully implemented in a limited number of STEM disciplines (e.g., computer science, mathematics) to increase motivation and engagement (Chou, 2018;Bartholomew & Mayo, 2018) as well as self-efficacy and interest (Tezza et al., 2020). ...
Drones continue to support the growth of the construction industry; however, activities that use drones for K-12 education are still minimal and exploratory. Particularly, no studies have explored the use of drone technologies to attract students towards construction disciplines. The contribution of this study centers on better understanding how drones can be relied upon to create interest and motivation in K-12 students by showcasing the construction domain to the next generation of the workforce. This study investigated the attitudes and interests towards construction of eleven middle school students enrolled in a Summer Youth Camp at the Michigan Technological University. During this study, a construction-centric drone education activity was designed and implemented during a 3-hour long session within a large lab space. Students completed an adapted version of the S-STEM Survey before and after participating in the activity. Although differences in the survey scores for attitudes towards STEM subjects and interests in construction careers were noticed, no significant changes were observed by the educational activity. Ultimately, this study recommends the use of drones in K-12 activities and purposes exploring how students can be attracted to the construction disciplines as future research.
... Some of these challenges involve developing a robot, either from scratch or starting with an off-theshelf platform, and forcing teams to follow the competition rules. These activities motivate and give hands-on experience, forcing students to solve unexpected problems, as demonstrated in Ribeiro and Lopes, 2020. However, Kaloti-Hallak et al., 2015 have concluded in their study that although competitions are effective in achieving meaningful learning in robotics and computer science concepts, competitions also have less desirable effects. ...
The Vulcano challenge is a new and innovative robotic challenge for legged robots in a physical and simulated scenario of a volcanic eruption. In this scenario, robots must climb a volcano’s escarpment and collect data from areas with high temperatures and toxic gases. This paper presents the main idea behind this challenge, with a detailed description of the simulated and physical scenario of the volcano ramp, the rules proposed for the competition, and the conception of a robot prototype, Vulcano, used in the competition. Finally, it discusses the performance of teams invited to participate in the challenge in the context of Azorean Robotics Open, the Azoresbot 2022. This first test for this challenge provided insights into what the participants found exciting and positive and what they found less positive.
... On the other hand, with the appearance of block programming, the development of applications for different users has been encouraged. It has had a great reception at an educational and even business level, initially developing mobile applications in App Inventor and expanding to robotics in the programming of educational hardware [9]- [11]. ...
... These technological tools and Education 4.0 have promoted the development of programming logic from an early age, motivating the study of careers aligned with Science, Technology, Engineering, Arts and Maths -STEAMcompetencies, which promote the industrial development of a Country [9], [12]- [14]. Furthermore, the new programming options are widely used at higher levels of training to program low-cost electronic kits [15]. ...
... The students could also use a 3D-printed underactuated robotic gripper to test the functionalities of the studied differential system grasping real objects. This activity thrilled all the students and allowed them to face challenging robotic matters with a simple approach that made them learn naturally and without effort [27,28]. Results demonstrated that the test rig and the approach proposed in this paper could facilitate the learning of robotics, making unskilled students deal with technical issues [29,30]. ...
Teaching robotics requires interdisciplinary skills and a good creativity, providing instructions and hands-on experiences, exploiting different kinds of learning. Two kinds of learning methods are commonly used: the ‘visual learning’ and the ‘auditory learning’, recognizable by the preference of an approach for images, rather than for texts, or oral explanations. A third possible learning style is the ‘kinesthetic learning’, based on tactile activities, which is generally least exploited, both by teachers in the classroom and by students during individual study. In this perspective, the use of educational test rigs is a good practice and adds an opportunity to share a passion for robotics. The paper focuses on the realization and application of an educational test rig aimed at explaining how a differential mechanism works and how it can be applied to robotic underactuated soft grippers to move multiple robotic fingers independently of each other using just a single actuator. The differential test bench was realized by 3D printing and mounted with the help of students in high school seminaries oriented to encourage students towards robotic or mechatronic studies. This activity was very thrilling for the students and helped them to approach robotics in a natural way, exploiting kinesthetic learning as it is demonstrated by test results.
... Specifically, it involves knowledge of programming, electronics, design, and fabrication; thus, critical thinking and problemsolving stimulation are inevitable. Moreover, robotic competitions help train and motivate young students in STEM education as the engagement provides stimuli to solve tangible societal problems [3][4][5][6]. The practice of competitions and prizes in an undergraduate course effectively stimulates ingenuity and innovation to ascertain defined educational outcomes. ...
... In the same direction, the authors in [11] have built a robotics platform only for 25 USD (2018) to implement a line-follower application where several skills related to sensors, Bluetooth communication and microcontrollers' programming have been improved in a STEM framework. More successful STEM implementations using robotics platforms can be found in [12][13][14][15][16][17][18][19][20][21][22][23][24][25][26][27]. Although these studies are distributed over different periods and were designed using different tools and resources, they all led to results promoting the capability of thinking as well as improving 21 st century skills. ...
Optimal path planning avoiding obstacles is among the most attractive applications of mobile robots (MRs) in both research and education. In this paper, an optimal collision-free algorithm is designed and implemented practically based on an improved Dijkstra algorithm. To achieve this research objectives, first, the MR obstacle-free environment is modeled as a diagraph including nodes, edges and weights. Second, Dijkstra algorithm is used offline to generate the shortest path driving the MR from a starting point to a target point. During its movement, the robot should follow the previously obtained path and stop at each node to test if there is an obstacle between the current node and the immediately following node. For this aim, the MR was equipped with an ultrasonic sensor used as obstacle detector. If an obstacle is found, the MR updates its diagraph by excluding the corresponding node. Then, Dijkstra algorithm runs on the modified diagraph. This procedure is repeated until reaching the target point. To verify the efficiency of the proposed approach, a simulation was carried out on a hand-made MR and an environment including 9 nodes, 19 edges and 2 obstacles. The obtained optimal path avoiding obstacles has been transferred into motion control and implemented practically using line tracking sensors. This study has shown that the improved Dijkstra algorithm can efficiently solve optimal path planning in environments including obstacles and that STEAM-based MRs are efficient cost-effective tools to practically implement the designed algorithm.
... Later, Micromouse became very popular in Europe, Japan and USA until nowadays. Due to the success of Micromouse, Dean Kamen founded FIRST (For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology) Association in 1989 and then the FIRST Robotic Competition season happened in 1992 in which high school students had to build and program a robot to complete a challenge [3,4]. ...
... It is possible to notice that robotics competitions found in most of the papers were RoboCup and First Robotics Competition, which is famous competitions focused more on education. The DARPA Robotics Challenge was also cited in most articles, which includes autonomous vehicles and complex tasks [3,35,49,53,81]. Figure 4 illustrates Table 3 and the numbers next to the competition name in the figure represent the number of articles in which the competition was cited. The spaces where the name is not specified are competitions cited in only one article. ...
... The DARPA is a robotic competition that is more professional and industry-focused, focused on innovative solutions for problems and it has prize money. The first editions were focused on autonomous vehicles and then the other editions included humanoid robots [3,35,53]. Table 4 presents the relevant information about each robotics competition extracted from the last review stage and based on the data extraction questions presented in Section 2.1.7, each topic (second column) associated with each competition (first column) is related to the questions. ...
This paper presents a systematic mapping literature review about the mobile robotics competitions that took place over the last few decades in order to obtain an overview of the main objectives, target public, challenges, technologies used and final application area to show how these competitions have been contributing to education. In the review we found 673 papers from 5 different databases and at the end of the process, 75 papers were classified to extract all the relevant information using the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses (PRISMA) method. More than 50 mobile robotics competitions were found and it was possible to analyze most of the competitions in detail in order to answer the research questions, finding the main goals, target public, challenges, technologies and application area, mainly in education.
... A. Hardware Features 1. Type of robots: Educational robots can be ready-made robotic kits and ready-to-use microcontroller platforms; they can be built on modular parts or designed from scratch using raw materials. Based on their assembly type, researchers classified educational robots in different categories [9], [10]. Mataric et al. [11], identified two general categories: Preassembled and Do-It-Yourself (DIY). ...
