Workshops
■ Workshop 1 in Japan: Design of Locomotion Patterns and Robot Contest on Flag Strike
Chair:
WeiHong Chin, Tokyo Metropolitan University, Japan
Abstract
Various types of robots have been applied to educational fields. Basically, there are three different aims in robot edutainment (education with entertainment): Learning on Robots, Learning through Robots and Learning with Robots. An educational partner robot can teach something through interaction with students in daily situation. The human-robot co-learning is a kind of Learning with Robots and we have developed various types of robot partners. To enhance the natural communication and interaction with students, we have to design the robot motion. Therefore, we focus on Learning through Robots in this workshop. This workshop provides the participants with the practice on the design of locomotion patterns for multi-legged robots using ODE (Open Dynamics Engine, https://www.ode.org/) from the viewpoint of Learning through Robots. Basically, participants don’t need the programming skill, but we assumed that participants install ODE on Windows, Macintosh or UNIX PC beforehand. First, participants learn the basic mathematical formulation of robot geometry and kinematics by trigonometric functions. Next, participants understand how to conduct multi-legged locomotion by computer simulations with ODE, and design locomotion patterns by text files as a group work. Finally, participants join a flag strike robot contest.