Francisco Pedro

Escola Básica Integrada de Rabo de Peixe

In this paper, we present an evolution of the Vulcano Robotics Competition, designed to promote interest in robots with legs, where robots have to achieve goals on a structure that simulates the slope of a volcano. A rough, undulating surface creates an additional obstacle to their movement. This new challenge is more complex so some hardware adjus...

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 descrip...

In recent years, there has been a growing trend toward the use of educational robots to foster interest in STEAM and support collaborative learning. On the other hand, competitions are considered to be powerful incentives for humans to become strongly involved in a specific topic. In particular, in robotics, several competitions have been proposed...

Educational robotics is nowadays used in various learning environments, adopting different learning goals depending on the application context (e.g. collaborative vs. competitive activities). The digital transformation and Industry 4.0 with the use of an increasing number of sensors, and the use of smart devices, have been demanding environments wh...

This paper described the functionalities of a simple robot adopted in the classroom to promote computational thinking (CT) in the context of the project PeCOT—computational thinking with tangible objects. This robot, similar to some commercial educational robots, was developed to be used in primary education classroom contexts (second, third, and f...

This paper describes the didactic robot Azoresbot v2, a new version of a previous robot Azoresbot already tested in context of robotics open type of events and also at schools. This new version of the robot uses a wifi module providing a way to communicate data received from the sensors as the robot executes its program. It is argued that this feat...

In this article we present the Paper-Code-Az project that aims to implement a tangible programming language platform, in which the code is read by a mobile device camera, to be used by an Arduino robot for elementary school children. A description of the different stages of the project is discussed. In the context of the first phase, a language syn...

Nowadays, educational robotics is part of the learning activities in many K-12 schools. With the increasing interest in Computer Thinking education and acknowledging the importance of using tangible devices, many different educational robots for primary education have become available. With them, new research activities bring about new results conc...

Robotic competitions in the context of the Robocup festival or similar, obey to a certain set of challenges that demands for each robot to have a set of sensors and actuators adapted to different environments. In this paper we present the Azoresbot robot that was developed in the context of a robotic regional competition which intends to foster the...