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

Volume

2

fYear

2004

fDate

April 26-May 1, 2004

Firstpage

1381

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;

fLanguage

English

Publisher

ieee

Conference_Titel

Robotics and Automation, 2004. Proceedings. ICRA '04. 2004 IEEE International Conference on

ISSN

1050-4729

Print_ISBN

0-7803-8232-3

Type

conf

DOI

10.1109/ROBOT.2004.1308017

Filename

1308017