Thinker Bot

Inspiration

We wanted to increase the quality and quantity of robotics and computer science in schools today. We observed the lack of education on these topics for young students in school. Since technology is becoming more and more integrated into our daily lives, we truly believe it is important for these topics to be introduced at an early age to garner interest from the younger generation to help them understand and change the world around them.

What it does

We designed an application to work with the real life Thinker Bot. This application serves as a way for students to program the robot and make the arms move. Students can easily click movement buttons, specify the degrees, press play and run the robot in real time.

How we built it

The actual robot frame was constructed, however not assembled prior to the event. During the event, the robot and all electrical aspects were assembled. Also during the event, our team developed the entire Thinker Bot application.

Challenges we ran into

The first overall challenge was rapidly building a new android app from scratch. In its component form, the app was somewhat simple to tackle, however assembling the individual components together was a challenge. The hardware side of things also proved to be a challenge.

Accomplishments that we're proud of:

We are proud of our UI design and how we were able to execute it without any heavy framework. We are also proud of our development time for all of the apps as well as having bug-free code. We are also very proud of our team communication given that we all have never worked with each other before.

What we learned

We learned that processing is great for rapid android/cross-platform development. We also learned that team communication platforms like Slack are very necessary for smooth development.

What's next for Thinker Bot

Thinker Bot is an ongoing project, our goal is to see schools purchasing Thinker Bot kits for students to assemble and code upon. Keep in mind that everything you see here today has been assembled and developed in just 36 hours. We believe that we can add many features to the application such as challenges in which the student is challenged in a fun game to execute a certain motion (such as pick up a cup), lesson plans with the robot, as well as a feature in which you can put multiple movements together to form a function.

Built With

• arduino
• bluetooth
• cad
• embedded-programming
• embedded-systems
• hardware
• ketai
• processing
• robot
• robotics
• tetrix