Title :
PolyBot and PolyKinetic™ System: a modular robotic platform for education
Author :
Golovinsky, Alex ; Yim, Mark ; Zhang, Ying ; Eldershaw, Craig ; Duff, Dave
Author_Institution :
Palo Alto Res. Center, CA, USA
fDate :
April 26-May 1, 2004
Abstract :
Modular robotics has been an active area of research for the last decade. In this paper, we argue that it also provides an excellent platform for education. PolyBot is a type of modular reconfigurable robot developed at PARC. The PolyKinetic™ System provides a robotic scripting language and programming environment for controlling this type of robot. Based on experience with mentoring high school students, and running a tutorial for robotic researchers at IROS´03, we show that, PolyBot and the PolyKinetic™ System is effective for educational activities at multiple levels. These include playing, exploring, building, programming, competing, and most of all, learning while having fun.
Keywords :
control engineering education; educational courses; programming environments; robot programming; Palo Alto Research Center; PolyBot; PolyKinetic System; educational activities; high school students; modular reconfigurable robot; modular robotic platform; programming environment; robotic researchers; scripting language; Control systems; Educational institutions; Educational robots; Humanoid robots; Legged locomotion; Mobile robots; Programming profession; Robot programming; Robot sensing systems; Robotics and automation;
Conference_Titel :
Robotics and Automation, 2004. Proceedings. ICRA '04. 2004 IEEE International Conference on
Print_ISBN :
0-7803-8232-3
DOI :
10.1109/ROBOT.2004.1308017
