Hey everyone, I have a question: Why are robots a common goto for beginners who are interested in STEM stuff?

Let me explain in more detail:

I'm posting this because Paganini said that his father assembled a 'build you own robot' kit (here viewtopic.php?f=4&t=7080&start=195#p97803) offhandedly. As a teacher of math, I interact with engineering students very often. And if any engineering student has any interest at all, it's in robotics. I am a sponsor for the college's Math and Engineering Club, and sure enough within 2 meetings, there was someone wanting to assemble a robot from a kit and display it for everyone else to see. My co-sponsor worked in the high school where she taught whole classes on building robots from kits. My college used to put on a huge annual robotics event, where teams from nearby high schools would compete for points, etc. When I was a kid my parents got me a robot kit (which wasn't all that great, but was interesting for a 10 yo boy I suppose). I remember watching the show "Battle Bots" and had ideas for how I wanted to make my own. Heck, I took a robotics course in undergrad where we used... Legos!

Why?

Why are robots 'a thing'? To me today I see them as no different than RC cars. If they are not directly controlled by someone, then their AI is universally bad and they have unreliable sensors, making the toy is almost useless. Assembling one is one thing, but have it useful at all is another. Also, what do you learn from assembling a robot kit? Or is it closer to a model plane where you are just doing it because the assembly itself is fun? Is the draw that robots have because it moves and does things in the physical realm?

I could see making a 6502 + 6522 computer move some servo motors and what not. So, as long as my 6502 has wheels, is it a robot? Is that more appealing than say: serial connection to PC? display graphics on VGA monitor? breadboards with LCD screens? chiptunes music? assembly programming? lots of blinky lights?

What experience do you have with robots? Is that something you could get into? For what reason? Why are they appealing?

General discussion, that's all. Thanks everyone!

Chad

I think it's because we like to have an effect on the world - robots act. And we like interactivity - the idea of robots which sense their environment and act accordingly is attractive. And we like autonomy - a self-directed robot is a step up from a pre-programmed toy like a Big Trak, or a remote-controlled vehicle.

For myself, the Micromouse maze-running contests were an interest. The cheapest 8 bit micros could just about fit into the micromouse form factor. A robot which could explore and then solve a maze, that really appealed to me.
https://ukmars.org/contests/micromouse/ ... e-history/

And if one wants to get into programming, without robots or similar (like a robot arm) what do you have? Maths-based things, game-like things. Oh, and music-related things. These certainly appeal to some, but not to all.

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The "second front page" is http://wilsonminesco.com/links.html .
What's an additional VIA among friends, anyhow?

I think robotics can be pretty interesting as a serious research field; I used to spend time during the summer at UofI in Champaign / Urbana IL. They had a cool robotics research lab with a lot of interesting projects. A few years ago I read about some swarm AI research that DARPA was doing for self-laying landmines, of all things. Recently I saw an article about a robot fish for scientists to infiltrate marine habitats for non-invasive observation. I mean, programming a robot fish to swim would be a pretty cool challenge! At the Atlanta Botanical Gardens they have a kind of climbing robot that runs around on wires strung all throughout the park. It wanders around and keeps an eye on things with a variety of sensors. That would also be pretty cool to work on!

But as far as those robot kits go, I'm right there with you. The one my Dad built would turn left if you clapped your hands. That was it. That doesn't hold much interest for me.

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"The key is not to let the hardware sense any fear." - Radical Brad

I of course see the need for robots as a whole. These larger (or smaller) projects are important. They do things. Like Garth said, they eliminate human error. Like Paganini said, they do things that humans cannot feasibly do. Do these more important cases in robotics *start* from Ed's maze runner bot? Or the clap hands / turn left bot? I can see an education scheme using these more simplistic models for learning, but at some point the need for serious uses would inevitably arise.

I get turned off by seeing the clap hands / turn left robots. They do nothing important. They won't help me daily, nor do I feel I really learned-learned something. Especially if it was from a kit, and not me creating my own bot from copper and silicon. Maybe it is just me as an adult, having already learned about computers, cars, carpentry, and the like. A clap hands / turn left toy doesn't impress me at all. A pre-programmed maze runner bot would be better. An AI driven maze runner bot would actually be impressive. So why do those toy/kits exist? What's the draw?

Maybe folks who think they are interested in robots don't really know what that means? I remember hearing from students a few times: "Oh, I'm going to get a robotics certificate!" "That's cool, I'm learning about digital electronics, creating my own computer." "Huh? Well, um, ok, robots are cooler." ( Not an exact dialog, but you get the gist. ) What we do here is *right* on the cusp of robotics stuff. Take Garth's Bench-1, put some wheels on it, put a big hunkin' arm on the top, and boom! You got a robot. And one that is WAY better than clap hands / turn left!

Thanks for the conversation. Sometimes I ask questions here that I've had for a long time, it's good to hear responses.

Chad

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x86?  We ain't got no x86.  We don't NEED no stinking x86!

I think the simplest kits are a bit like a "hello world" programming exercise. They get you from knowing nothing and supposing that everything is magic, or beyond you, to the point where you can make a thing. It may be a very simple thing, but it proves a point, and it might be the first step of many.

Think of the very first book a child might read: we don't expect it to be their peak performance, or really even to be an end in itself, but the start of the journey. And it gets you from seeing meaningless marks on paper to the idea that there's language in writing.

Don't forget to look up the old Heathkit Hero1...

There's a lot of robotic projects out on thingaverse. One that I liked was a SCARA robotic arm, which is the type used for a lot of automotive assembly. Also note that the specialized processing capabilities of smaller boards like the nVidia Jetson series are used in the AI side... lots of bang for the buck, but alas, high-level programming languages and endless libraries. Then again, the Jetson Nano costs around $99 and can run Linux reasonably well... once you add a SD-Card and power supply.

Needless to say, robotics is of high interest with younger ones... but time will tell how many of them continue down the path. After all, pretty much every kid who ever visited NASA at a young age wanted to be an astronaut!

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Regards, KM
https://github.com/floobydust

If a whole kit was "hello world", then what would the equivalent of loops and conditionals be! [ Not a question. ] I think of books in a completely different category, but I do see your point. I am not disqualifying what you are saying Ed, it is good points.



I know that folks working in robotics eventually will be using those things to some degree, but that doesn't make it right. I personally do not like endless libraries Maybe that makes me a bad software engineer?



Yeah, that was me too. I still want to honestly. I look at folks like Richard Garriott, and still have hope even for myself. I have researched different methods of rocket propulsion, I have designed physics simulators for rocket ships and the planets. I once tried to build my own plane from fence poles, wood, and cloth. Ever just look up? Today we are all too focused on looking down, at our cell phones.



And if you attach a 6502 to it, we could call it a robot! See BDD, erector sets were "real toys". Gosh, I'm sure the Statics Engineering class I taught years ago would have benefited greatly by everyone having their own erector set. Typically they settle for Legos, or popsicle sticks. *shrug*

Chad

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http://WilsonMinesCo.com/ lots of 6502 resources
The "second front page" is http://wilsonminesco.com/links.html .
What's an additional VIA among friends, anyhow?

Hobby rocketry has grown up from when we were kids: https://www.nar.org/high-power-rocketry-info/

FIRST Robotics is a serious competition among college and high school students: https://www.firstinspires.org/robotics/frc

I think it grew from the LEGO Leagues based on LEGO Mindstorms.

Two of the robotics kits and parts suppliers are in the D/FW area. If you plan it right, you can probably arrange tours of both in a single day. As an educator, they will be glad to see you.

https://www.vexrobotics.com/

https://www.revrobotics.com/

Finally, combat robotics is a popular spectator sport: https://battlebots.com/

I think the interesting thing about robots(even from a kit) is that they appear to be "alive" ie moving either under a simple program or through a remote control situation with a human operator. That way they capture the imagination. It's important to recognize that most of us here are coming here because we were into computing a long time ago and thus it was programming for solving a problem or applying electronic experience in a more general and interactive way.
I got into personal computing in the early days after using Fortran in University for signal processing. I like to say I never programmed in anger by which I mean professionally. I did enough in various languages to solve problems for work related projects and data analysis but not for other people to use.
After retiring I got interested in Arduino in order to keep my mind stimulated. That led to returning to my early experience in the 6502 world (after watching Ben Eater's videos). I did build a few basic Arduino moving vehicles to learn a bit more about hardware and a few years ago got a Lego Mindstorms kit intended for my grandson. It's still with me and the only robot I have built with it is one for solving the Rubik's Cube designed and programmed by David Gilday.
All this is a long way to say that people have to start somewhere. Some will continue and become engineers or programmers others will move to some other toy and leave it behind. It's like exploring, be it sports, music or anything else to see if (a) its interesting (b) too difficult or (c) a gateway to a related field for employment.
As a parent or grandparent you like to see what interests or abilities your offspring may have. Often that means exposing them to your own areas of interest. In the end it's up to them what they will choose to do or not do with that exposure. I think a good teacher looks at his students in the same way, some are just there because they need the credit, others show promise and are encouraged but in the end you hope they all learned something that will stay with them.

Why robots? Simple. Engagement and instant feedback and that's what you need to hook some kids into the world of computing (electronics, and so on).

Even just getting an LED to blink is sometimes good enough - Way back in the early 80's I made up some traffic light simulators with LEDs for the BBC Micro and they went down really well in the class I gave them to. They also had the Big Track programmable tank/robot and it always went down well, as well as mechanical Turtles.

Basically anything other than staring at a boring screen to try to engage newbies into our world.

But make it high level - give kids a 6502 and assembly language manual to start with and you'll lose them a second later.

Here's an example of todays little robots for the BBC Micro:Bit - https://kitronik.co.uk/collections/robo ... ccessories

But also check the other little kits on that site - they're all about visual and movement experiences and not staring at a screen.

-Gordon

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Gordon Henderson.
See my Ruby 6502 and 65816 SBC projects here: https://projects.drogon.net/ruby/

Ah, Gilday's mindcuber - splendid!

I think it's very difficult, when you're grown, to remember how it is when you didn't know what you know now. And even if you do remember, teaching is different from reliving your own journey. This is why there are courses to teach people to be teachers, or at least to start them off on the journey.

And so any of us here can look at something simple and dismiss it, because it wouldn't tell us anything. Nor would it inspire us, because we're already greatly interested. We have to take a different perspective to see the value in it - and of course, some offerings are going to have more value than others. Lego has merits, Meccano has merits, and they are different.

Some time ago, let's say I was late-40s or 50s, my mother bought me a very cheap and simple clip together set, with a motor and a solar cell and not much more. It's best to take it as a joke present... certainly there was nothing I could learn from it! It had the merit that you could build three or four things, according to instructions given. Might it have any merit at all to a child? I think it depends on their starting point, because it does show that you can make a thing - things do not just come ready-made. And it shows, in a way, that if you clip the things together in the right way, it will work, and not otherwise. With a supervising adult it might even say something about electrical continuity and polarity - if you swap the wires, the motor goes the other way, I suppose. And the solar cell tells you something about light intensity - it's not obvious to the uninitiated the great difference between electric light, daylight, and full sunlight.

As a toy, it's fairly low value, but I can see how it could be used for a half day of teaching, with a suitable relationship and with sufficient curiosity.

So at our university, the first year project (Everyone did the same for the first year) was a "line following robot". Mine was OK, but I have to say some other people made some pretty damn good ones.

I believe the point of this particular project is that it gives the students an introduction to a lot of key concepts and skills they'll need going forward, but does so in a way that is fun and engaging to people who might otherwise struggle to get "get into", say, a bluetooth connected set of weighing scales (which was my second year project). Most of the students got really competitive about who could build the fastest and/or most reliable.

For us it wasn't a kit per se, but the basic blueprint of what and how was set out for us and we were given a bunch of components and suggestions how to proceed. I believe the idea there is that by keeping everyone's robot broadly similar, it is easier for the lab techs to give pointers and advice without having to deep-dive into a student's specific project. It also means they're less likely to end up with something that completely fails to function. Nevertheless, ideas and creativity remain: in particular I recall there was a great variety of quantity and positioning of the light sensors, number of buttons/indicator LEDs on the control boards, etc. One person even put a pair of sensors out on adjustable crab arms which looked really cool.

• We were introduced to using the workshop and basic mechanical design through the physical construction of the robot. Most hardware was provided, but we were given freedom in the design of the "front" of the robot, where the sensors are, so we can place as many as we like and wherever we like.
• Schematic and PCB capture tools, manufacturing and assembly. Whilst we were given a basic outline of an H-Bridge driver circuit for the motors, we still had to design the circuit ourselves more or less from scratch and take it through the whole process for capture, manufacture to soldering the parts on.
• Programming the microcontroller. Whilst we were taught some basic C programming in one of the modules, no software was provided, we just had to figure it out.
• Learning about feedback and control loops. Whilst we hadn't done any formal Control theory yet in first year, programming the robot would introduce the concept (in practice if not in name).

Honestly, I think it was a great first project.

I've heard they changed the project a few years later and it is now greatly simplified, for example it now uses an off-the-shelf "maze runner" chassis, so no mechanical construction or freedom of design there any more. This was done 1. to make it cheaper and 2. so that they could enter the students into an inter-university challenge that required the use of these components. I understand why they changed it, but for the purposes of actual education I think the original version of the project as described above was superior, because the students had more creative input and had to engage in a greater variety of skills to build it.

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Want to design a PCB for your project? I strongly recommend KiCad. Its free, its multiplatform, and its easy to learn!
Also, I maintain KiCad libraries of Retro Computing and Arduino components you might find useful.