The Art of Robotics

By Abraham Dale

This is the first year TEACH-NW has offered students the chance to compete in the FIRST Tech Challenge. On Saturday, Jan 10th, students competed in Hillsboro, Oregon. So what is Robotics exactly? “Robotics combines computer science, engineering, and technology to design, construct, and utilize machines that are programmed to replicate or substitute human actions and decision-making. These machines, known as robots, are deployed across a broad spectrum of industries to improve productivity, efficiency, and safety. Because robots can be used in so many ways, robotics is a broad, interdisciplinary field, meaning that there are many ways to study it and find a specialized career.” [Michigan Tech] I was curious to hear from someone who has never done robotics before. Here is what teacher Duffy Hummel had to say. 

Q:Do you think it is a good idea to learn robotics and why?

A: Ms Hummel: “Yes!  Robotics inspires students to be creative and problem-solve together.  It also helps students learn aspects of science they couldn't in a textbook.”

Q:What skills from your subject do you think would transfer well to robotics?  

A: Ms Hummel: “Literacy skills, collaboration, and problem solving skills.”

Q: How do you think robotics could be included in a classroom?  

A: Ms Hummel: “Structure and planning out activities.  Robotics could be incorporated into any classroom!”

(These are goals in FTC robotics)

Here is a quote from Google about why robots can be a good thing: 

“Having a machine learning agent interact with its environment requires true unsupervised learning, skill acquisition, active learning, exploration and reinforcement, all ingredients of human learning that are still not well understood or exploited through the supervised approaches that dominate deep learning today. Our goal is to improve robotics via machine learning, and improve machine learning via robotics. We foster close collaborations between machine learning researchers and roboticists to enable learning at scale on real and simulated robotic systems.” [Google]

I hope you are now interested in Robotics, thank you for reading my article.

(Michigan Tech)

https://www.mtu.edu/academics/robotics/what/

(Google)

https://research.google/research-areas/robotics/