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The RoboWaiter Project at Madatech
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The RoboWaiter Project at Madatech |
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RoboWaiter - A Project for Peace at the OlimpYeda!
 Team Players
Two students from Trinity College in the Usa, with the generous assistance of The Kathryn Wasserman Davis 100 Projects for Peace fund, have come to Madatech to implement The RoboWaiter Project, as part of the OlimpYeda summer camp; constructing and programming a robot using Lego Mindstorm NXT kits.
The project's two objectives are:
• Endowing scientific and technological knowledge to the students about programming a robot that will function and perform varied tasks
• Training a bi-national group, in an area of conflict and facilitating mutual work, leading to peace dialogue and cooperation, through team work.
Robotics on the Move
Every year the college hosts the Trinity College Fire Fighting Home Robot Contest, an international robotics contest encouraging inventors of all ages to develop an autonomous fire-fighting home computer-controlled mobile robot. A single candle is randomly placed in one of the rooms and the robot should navigate the maze of rooms, locate the candle and extinguish the fire in minimum time. A few years ago, members of the Connecticut Council on Developmental Disabilities designed the RoboWaiter competition. In this competition, the main object is to create an autonomous robot that can find and carry a plate of food from a refrigerator to a person with a disability.
The Madatech Connection
Prof. igor Werner of the Technion's Department of Education in Techmology and Science is one of the founders of the Fire Fighting Contest and is the OlimpYeda's robotics scientific consultant. On one of his visits with the Israeli teams to the Fire Fighting contest, he contacted Prof. David J Ahlgren of Trinity College and offered his students to come to Madatech and implement their peace project by training outstanding students in the field of robotics at the OlimpYeda. Designing and constructing robots is done in teams, requiring mutual work, of all members, sharing opinions and ideas for one cause: developing a robot that will assist disabled people in their everyday chores. Such a cooperation can promote a peace dialogue, and an Arab-Jewish co-existense in the framework of a scientific project for humane causes.
"From all over the world, people bring their ideas together and build magical things together. This idea can be translated to children in Israel, Arab and Jews that can work together, share their ideas, cooperate, connect and build a robot that works" says Sarthak, one of the students.
 Program Yourself
The two students, Binay Poudel and Sarthak Khanal, originally from Nepal , currently studying at Trinity College. They are 22, majoring in electronic engineering and have built and programmed the RoboWaiter model. For a total of 8 hours during the olimpYeda summercamp, they will train participants using LEGO MindStorm NXT kits, in order to design and program a similar robot that will accomplish the same requested tasks. The children will receive a robot with a partly built-in engine and have to construct a similar model after learning basic steps in programming. Children will gain knowledge of translating terms of distance, adjusting robot sensors and engine programming, in order to design a mobile robot that can complete his mission from beginning to end.
"Such a project demands different people to come together, share their ideas, share their feelings, bond, and produce something that is magical like a robot, or any other engineering stuff" says Binay
The Arena
Madatech's workshop has built a special arena in which the summercamp children will work on their RoboWaiters. Inside the arena there is a plate standing on a shelf model, showing red bright lights. The robot needs to navigate in the arena in an even distance from the walls, avoiding obstacles and identify the lights coming from the shelf, using its sensors. After finding the plate, he has to pick it up, navigate back to a disabled person sitting by a table, serve him the and then return to the starting point.
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