In January 2020, Artisan’s Asylum once again became a creative hub for international collaboration, hosting a group of bright, curious students from South Korea for a two-week deep dive into design thinking and robotics. The students were a mix of high school and university level and a few had some lego robotics experience but the group as a whole was largely non-technical. Our primary goal was to teach the concept of design thinking to encourage brainstorming and creative problem solving. The technical aspect of the workshop was a mix of hands on fabrication and robotics programming. We used the recently released Sphereo RVR robotics platform which can be programmed using the block coding MakeCode platform which enabled students with no programming experience to get up to speed quickly. There was a goal to utilize the serial control and Raspberry Pi integration to add some advanced sensing to the platform but that turned out to be too ambitious to add on top of everything else we accomplished.
This year’s workshop challenged students to explore how robots could benefit society. Through a structured design thinking process, the students tackled real-world problems by brainstorming, ideating, and narrowing down ideas into actionable prototypes. They explored concepts from medical delivery robots for hospitals to search and rescue applications to domestic assistance robots. Students completed a down selection process to decide what they wanted to build a model of. The goal was to build a model environment and program the RVR robot to navigate that environment along with a narrative to explain how a life size robot would perform a task to help people. Once teams decided on a task for their robot some students started learning programming on the RVR’s and others build a small cardboard model of the environment they wanted to build. The most memorable was a team wanted to build a fire safety, search and rescue robot and built a model of Artisans Asylum as if there was a fire and the robot had to navigate the shops and rubble to check for survivors.
Small model of the fire scenario in the shop with 3d printed RVR robot for scale.
Large model navigated by RVR robot.
The programming was fairly simple the robots had RGB LEDs which the students used to represent the robot completing an action in their narrative. The RVR robots have a color sensor on the bottom and it was used to trigger navigation events or LED color change “actions”. For their presentations at the end of the program I installed a Raspberry Pi with a camera on the robot and streamed a first person view onto a projector so that the audience could get a better close up perspective of the models the students had built.
One team of students built a robot to demonstrate automating work on a farm which took advantage of the RVR’s all terrain treads to climb hills to herd free range live stock or water crops after delivering feed for live stock in a barn.
Another team developed a model of a hospital to show a robot delivering medicine and checking on patients.
Small hospital model:
Large Hospital Model which had 3 levels and a simulated elevator to bring the robot from floor to floor. It moved through the floors performing different “actions” and finally ended on the 3rd floor where it parked in a simulated solar charge station. The students on this team really thought through not only the role of the environment but the necessary modifications to the building to enable these robot assistants.
The results were fun, functional, and full of imagination—robots that cleaned, delivered, organized, or assisted in simple but meaningful ways. More importantly, the students walked away with new skills, new confidence, and a real sense of what it means to prototype with purpose.