An open source framework for educational applications using cozmo mobile robot

Abstract

Cozmo is a real-life robot designed to interact with people playing games, making sounds, expressing emotions on a LCD screen and many other pre-programmable functions. We present the development and implementation of an educational platform for Cozmo mobile robot, with several features, including web server for user interface, computer vision, voice recognition, robot trajectory tracking control, among others. Functions for educational purposes were implemented, including mathematical operations, spelling, directions, and questions functions that gives more flexibility for the teachers to create their own scripts. In this system, a cloud voice recognition tool was implemented to improve the interactive system between Cozmo and the users. Also, a cloud computing vision system was used to perform object recognition using Cozmo's camera, to be applied on educational games. Other functions were created with the purpose of controlling the emotions and the motors of Cozmo to create more sophisticated scripts. To apply the functions on Cozmo robot, an interpreter algorithm was developed to translate the functions into Cozmo's programming language. To validate this work, the proposed framework was presented to several elementary school teachers (classes with students between 4 and 12). Students and teacher's impressions are reported in this text, and indicate that the proposed system can be a useful educational tool.