Robotics, Education, and Sustainable Development

Abstract

The growing demand for technological innovation to enable empowerment of developing communities requires new and creative educational initiatives. Thus, well designed higher educational initiatives geared towards appropriate technology for developing communities can have a significant global impact. This paper presents the challenges and benefits of three higher education initiatives in Sri Lanka, Ghana, and the USA that focus on innovating and implementing relevant technology for developing communities. The authors examine the potential intersections of robotics and its component technologies with education and sustainable development. The paper concludes with an assessment of factors that contribute to the success of higher educational initiatives designed to enable technology relevant to developing communities.

A Systematic Review of Studies on Educational Robotics

“…Prior literature gives evidence of a range of settings in which educational robotics programs have been employed. For instance, many research studies explored the effectiveness of educational robots in school settings (Bers & Urrea, 2000;Dias, Mills-Tettey, & Nanayakkara, 2005;Resnick, 1993), in technical and vocational schools (Alimisis, Karatrantou, & Tachos, 2005), after-school programs Rusk, Resnick, Berg, & Pezalla-Granlund, 2008), summer camps (Balaguer Alvarez, 2017;Barger, Gilbert, & Boyette, 2011;Ericson & Mcklin, 2012;, project-based learning environments (Carbonaro et al, 2004), and various STEM fields (Hussain et al, 2006;Nugent et al, 2010). Prior studies argued that educational robotics and participation on a robotics team have the potential to significantly influence a child's academic and social skills by allowing them to actively engage in critical thinking and problem solving through designing, assembling, coding, operating, and modifying robots for specific goals .…”

Robots for Humanitarian Demining

“…Still robots are well for clean environments [20][21][22][23][24][25][26]. However, demining area is not lat and it consist lot of obstacles.…”

The AROUND project: Adapting robotic disaster response to developing countries

“…The AROUND (Autonomous Robots for Observation of Urban Network after Disaster) project launched by several French 3 and Vietnamese partners 4…”

“…We are following a similar trend in the AROUND project in order to produce low-cost reconnaissance robots adapted to emergent countries. Another interest of the use of low-cost technologies is that it will be easier to make technology transfers, to develop training programs [4] (like V-Unit and TechBridgeWorld held by the Carnegie Mellon Robotics Institute) and finally to support the emerging robotic industry in Vietnam.…”