An Educational, Semi-autonomous Telepresence Robot Called Sally

Abstract

Approaching technologies to young users has been broadly tackled in the past years through different methods. From well-known competitions, to commercial kits, students are quickly grasping technology at early stages of life. At La Salle-URL university we have been developing robotics workshops for the past 8 years. Despite the efforts on constantly improving these workshops, we have reached a point where a radical change is required. There is an urgent need to update our workshops programme to offer more challenging content and new methodologies addressing the current students’ demands on the one hand. On the other, we also need workshops that integrate in an effective way the inclusion of both on-line and on-site students without being detrimental to either group. In this paper, we propose a new academic methodology for the robotics workshops, along with additional tools. In this sense, we present our robot Sally, a semi-autonomous telepresence robot, that will support the proposed methodology. Students will be introduced to robotic capabilities that are currently being used in research and industry; 3D design; multiple sensors and actuators programming and applications for a voice assistant, among other topics.