PolyBot and PolyKinetic/spl trade/ System: a modular robotic platform for education

Abstract

Modular robotics has been an active area of research for the last decade. In this paper, we argue that it also provides an excellent platform for education. PolyBot is a type of modular reconfigurable robot developed at PARC. The PolyKinetic/spl trade/ System provides a robotic scripting language and programming environment for controlling this type of robot. Based on experience with mentoring high school students, and running a tutorial for robotic researchers at IROS'03, we show that, PolyBot and the PolyKinetic/spl trade/ System is effective for educational activities at multiple levels. These include playing, exploring, building, programming, competing, and most of all, learning while having fun.