Comparison Shopping for Domestic Robots

A great many folks out there still seem to think of  robots as things of 'The Future.' Or perhaps, their understanding is that robots are actually here right now, but to be found in exotic locations like automobile manufacturing plants, NASA facilities, and the like. Guess again! Not only are robots close to home currently, but they are so much in evidence that one not only is confronted with the choice of whether or not to acquire one, but which one to buy. In fact, some serious comparison shopping for robots will be a part of our lives soon.

Below are some promotional videos for household window and mirror cleaning robots. Which one would you buy for your home? Why choose that one?

Kids Learn Programming with Robot Turtles Game

Here's a most interesting video and article about a new game, presented here as appropriate for young children (although it could be used by just about anyone).

In the very beginning of the use of  computers in the  classroom people reflexively thought that what kids should do would be to build their own computers and/or learn to program computers. When folks like myself came on the scene a few years later, we argued hard that this was a foolish approach, wasteful of the true potential for computing in Education, which would be to support thinking, research, communicating, etc. We reasoned that, if by analogy, the point of motor vehicles in Education was to get students  from point A to point B (to school, to the museum, to the library, etc.) why would students benefit from understanding how a car or  bus works? how to repair and maintain them? design them? (other, of course, than for that very small  group of students who would  actually go into the Automotive Industry)... Part of our aversion to this approach was due to the very obvious, heavy investment in time, effort, and resources needed for students to learn to build, repair,  and program computers. As of late, though, a number of items have emerged that make learning to program  practical and easy to learn... the LEGO Robotics systems - NXT and WeDo, chief among them... but there are others that continue to emerge. The Robot Turtles Game is an approach that seems practical and worthwhile.

By the way, why should kids learn to program? That's a long discussion, but clearly programming is all about thinking clearly, problem solving, and communication... in the extreme! Aren't those things that schools should foster? If you can add a large dosage of FUN to the equation, it's win/win!

 

"Robot Turtles Is A Board Game Designed By A Googler To Teach Kids Core Coding Principles"

"There are plenty of online resources aimed at teaching kids coding but here's an offline take that uses old school gamification to get kids engaged and learning programming principles while they're having some good old-fashioned family fun (as board game makers used to put it, in the 1980s). Robot Turtles is a board game designed by entrepreneur and CEO of Google Comparison Dan Shapiro - currently on leave from the day job so he can work on cool projects like this.
The board game is designed to teach basic programming principles via a series of instruction cards which move the players' pieces (turtles) around the board. The basic object of the game is for players to navigate a maze and capture jewels but the gameplay is sneakily teaching them core coding fundamentals, such as using limited syntax to express complex ideas, getting a grasp on order of operations, and learning debugging by being able to undo instructions when they make mistakes. In other words: essential coding skills.
The game also builds in more sophisticated gameplay layers by letting kids graduate from playing one instruction card at a time..."

Read the full article at its source: http://techcrunch.com/2013/09/04/robot-turtles/  

Soon kids will program robots before they walk!

"In late 2012, Vikas Gupta left his job as head of the consumer payments division at Google and set out to discover what he would do with the rest of his life. He'd recently had a daughter, and he knew his next venture would involve helping kids. Then he chanced across an article about Estonia, and how that country begins teaching programming to all children in first grade. He did a little research into the state of computer science education in America and was shocked to find how rare it was. So he set out to create a compelling way for children as young as four or five to start learning basic coding concepts.

The result was Play-i, a new startup building robots that it hopes will teach children about programming through play. The company is launching a crowdfunding campaign today to raise $250,000 for its first two models. "Thinking back on my own life, I began learning computer science at 14. I couldn’t imagine absorbing those programming concepts, at least the way I was taught them, at an early age," says Gupta, who serves as Play-i's CEO. "But research from MIT and Tufts showed pre-schoolers can grasp programming concepts, most just don’t have the right tools or framework provided to them."

 

The team at Play-i decided to avoid abstract concepts and the traditional focus on written code and syntax that are the core elements of most common programming languages today. "A lot of coding is about putting things in a sequence," says Gupta. "Ask a four- or five-year-old kid to write out a sequence, and they have trouble organizing a long string of commands. But if you reframe that as a song with lyrics, or a story with a narrative, children that age can create and remember long, complex sequences."

 

Kids interact with Play-i's robots, Yana and Bo, by giving them instructions. This can be through a tablet or smartphone, where they can drag and drop a sequence of commands. "As they do this, we can begin to introduce some other basic elements of coding, like the concept of loops, or an 'if this than that' instruction," says Gupta. Bo, which can play music on a xylophone, also responds to physical commands. "You can move him, and he will remember that motion, store it as a command, and allow you to play it back or insert it into a sequence."

 

Gupta assembled a team of hardware experts to help him build Play-i's robots. Co-founder Saurabh Gupta, no relation, is a former engineering manager at Apple who helped design and build 10 generations of iPods. And co-founder Mikal Greaves is a former of employee of Frog Design, where he led the engineering team on projects for Motorola, Disney, and Ford. "We're all programmers and engineers passionate about technology, but above all, we're parents," says Gupta. "We knew the biggest engineering challenge was keeping the robots affordable."

 

Read the full article at  its  source: http://www.theverge.com/2013/10/28/5024608/play-robot-learning-computer-science-into-a-game

 

Robot Actors - Awesome Educational Resource

We often think about robots as being cold and unemotional. But robots have great potential as a platform from which their human creators and masters can express feelings and ideas. A few visionaries have realized this, Disney's theme park amusements and movie makers, are some of the better examples. Education is an area in which this largely unexplored potential can see great advantages. There are 2 fronts on which this is likely true: 1) robots as teachers or teaching devices, and 2) making robotic resources available to students (along with instruction in how to use them) and challenging them to produce  robotic creations that express their thoughts, feelings, and ideas in an affective way. See the article and videos below...

 "The Cornish robotic actor coming to a theatre near you: £55,000 Robo-thespian delights and offends audiences

- RoboThespian has in-built cameras, depth perception and facial recognition
- It can adapt its script to the audience during stage shows and guided tours
- Several RoboThespians, however, have been attacked for causing offence
They may look more like Wall-E than the raging humanoid robots in 'I, Robot', but these thespian actors are certainly causing a stir.
RoboThespian is the creation of Cornish engineer Will Jackson who had an idea to develop an artistic robot that could react with its audiences. Six years ago he embarked on a project to create a robot that would save tour guides from tediously repeating the same script each day.
Today, around 35 RoboThespians are delighting theatre-goers and tourists throughout the world.
They are also trained to recognise gestures such as waving goodbye and are able to copy body poses. They are multi-lingual and can even sing. But not everyone is pleased with the humanoid robots. Jackson told Humans Invent how one RoboThespian was punched by someone in Germany..."

...The company claims that increasingly academic research groups and universities are using the robots in their research and development platforms...
...A restaurant in Seoul, where robots cook all the food and robots take your order, is also using RoboThespians as part of its operations. 
Meanwhile, three RoboThespians recently reached new artistic heights by appearing in a live stage show, the Legend of Robotland: Tria’s Star, featuring a completely robotic cast..."


Read the full article at its source: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2382419/The-Cornish-robotic-actor-coming-theatre-near--55-000-Robothespian-delights-offends-audiences.html

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Yesterday's Science Fiction is Today's Robotics Reality

Science Fiction Theater was a late 1950's TV show. Here's an episode titled "Time Is Just A Place" that features a house  cleaning robot, a miniature X-Ray machine, and other innovative devices  from what seemed to be a fantastic, distant future when it aired. Take a look! You'll find the retro TV show production style entertaining. You'll also find it informative about the  emergence of technology and our attitudes about it.

Students Control Flying Robot with Their Thoughts!

" Controlling flying robots with your mind

A graduate student wearing a skull cap covered in wires sits perfectly still and thinks about making a fist with his right hand. Nearby, a small quadcopter - a flying drone with four rotors - turns right. He imagines making a fist with his left hand and the robotic flying copter goes left. After a thought about clenching both hands, it lifts higher into the air.

He is controlling the device with his mind.

The system is part of a new research project that reads the brain's electrical activity and translates certain thoughts into commands for the unmanned aerial vehicle. It's called a brain-computer interface, and someday it could have important uses for people who are paralyzed.
"We envision that they’ll use this technology to control wheelchairs, artificial limbs or other devices," said University of Minnesota engineering professor Bin He in a post announcing the project.

Here's how it works: Imagining specific movements without actually doing them produces electric currents in the motor cortex. The interface itself isn't new, but the researchers used brain imaging scans to find out exactly which imagined movements activated which neurons.

Once they mapped out the various thoughts and associated signals, they used them to control a helicopter simulation on a computer. Next, they moved on to real flying devices.

There are no implants or invasive brain tweaks needed for subject to control the copter with their brain. The technology is called electroencephalography (EEG). The skull cap uses 64 electrodes to detect these currents from a subject's brain as they think about associated actions, then translates that data into instructions and transmits them to the quadcopter over Wi-Fi.

In the test, pilots weren't allowed to look at the quadcopter while they controlled it, only a screen showing the view from a small camera mounted on the front of the flying vehicle. After a few hours of training, the subjects could move the quadcopters with precision, even  guiding them through hoops suspended from the ceiling.

Flying is just the start for this technology, He said."
Read the full article at its source: http://whatsnext.blogs.cnn.com/2013/06/06/flying-robots-you-control-with-your-mind/

 

Student Focus Question(s):  What other types of robots would this sort of control be particularly good for? Do you see any problems with this way of controlling robots? What do you think would happen if 2 people who could control robots this way had a disagreement about what to make the robot do?
After thinking about this, you can enter your response using the "Comments" function, below (to the left of the envelope icon). Feel free to identify your school and/or class....

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Click on book cover for information on Getting Started with LEGO Robotics.

Anyone who works with kids can do LEGO Robotics, a rich and highly motivating platform for important STEM Learning! (surprisingly affordable, too) This books explains it all!

Check out ROBOTICS for TEACHERS Podcast
www.roboticsforteachers.com