Extending Educational Robot Sensing Capabilities Through Equipping an External Microcontroller

The popularity of the educational robot in K-12 classroom has dramatically increased in the past decades to engage students studying not only Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM), but also 21st-century skills. Most educational robots tend to be as simple as possible such that the lower grades can benefit from the robotics technologies safely. However, such design consideration makes most educational robots with none or minimal sensing capabilities. However, it is very important for senior students to learn more advanced robotics concepts and applications. This paper presents a concept of extending educational robots’ sensing capabilities through quipping an external microcontroller. The paper also demonstrates how the framework can be easily used in sensor-based applications through a line-following example.

Mechanology, Mindstorms, and the Genesis of Robots

This chapter examines the emergence of educational robotics, drawing on the philosophy of technology of Gilbert Simondon. In the 1950s, Simondon argued that the dominant understandings of technology are personified in the popular imaginings of the robot. These attitudes are polarised between simple instrumentalism, and dystopian anxiety about technology overcoming humankind. To improve the conceptualisation of technics he took an approach called mechanology, developing a suite of concepts that grasped technology in new ways: technological genesis; the margin of indetermination; lineages of abstract and concrete technologies; and the associated milieu. These concepts are useful in understanding the tradition of educational robotics starting in the 1970s, with Seymour Papert's ‘turtle' robot serving as a resource for learning mathematics. Since the 1980s, LEGO's Mindstorms kits have introduced learners and consumers to robotics concepts. Since the 1990s, theorists of embodied cognition in the 2000s have made use of Mindstorms to draw attention to the limits of symbolic intelligence.

Kinematic and Dynamic Analysis of Flexible-Link Parallel Robots by Means of an ERLS Approach

The use of parallel kinematic structures allows to design light manipulators with higher dynamic performance with respect to serial robots. In this work, the issue of accurately modelling the dynamics of lightweight flexible-link parallel robots has been investigated. The Equivalent Rigid-Link System (ERLS) formulation, useful for describing the dynamic evolution of 3D serial robots with flexible-links, has been extended to Parallel-Kinematic-Machines (PKM) both from the theoretical and from the software implementation points of view. Standard robotics concepts of 3D kinematics are exploited to formulate and solve the ERLS kinematics, thus allowing to easily work with this formulation. A simulator, capable of predicting the deformations due to the elasticity of the links, has been developed and some industrial case-studies have been implemented to validate it. The formulation and the developed simulator will give the opportunity to extensively study the deformations of parallel manipulators, allow to predict the vibrations of the system, and, then, compensate them.