Robots and Education in the classroom and in the museum: On the study of robots, and robots for study

Abstract

The Mobile Robot Programming Lab and the Toy Robots Initiative at Carnegie Mellon's Robotics Institute both focus on the interaction between humans and robots for the sake of education. This paper describes two specific endeavors that are representative of the work we do in robot education and human-robot interaction. The first section describes the Mobile Robot Programming Lab curriculum designed for undergraduate and graduate students with little or no mobile robotics experience. The second section describes the process by which an edutainment robot, Insect Telepresence, was designed, tested and evaluated by our group and CMU's HumanComputer Interaction Institute. Introduction Mobile robots ground ethereal computation to palpable physicality, and as a result they have the potential to excite and inspire children and adults in a way that no desktop computer can. Robots themselves make an inherently fascinating hybrid-dynamical system for study and comprehension. At the s...