The robot garden provides an aesthetically pleasing educational platform that can visualize computer science concepts and encourage young students to pursue programming and robotics.
Computational thinking is an important part of a modern education, and robotics provides a powerful tool for teaching programming logic in an interactive and engaging way. The robot garden is a distributed multi-robot system capable of running autonomously or under user control from a simple graphical interface.
Over 100 origami flowers are actuated with LEDs and printed pouch motors, and are deployed in a modular array around additional swimming and crawling folded robots. The garden integrates state-of-the-art rapid design and fabrication technologies with distributed systems software techniques to create a scalable swarm in which robots can be controlled individually or as a group.
The garden can be used to teach basic algorithmic concepts through its distributed algorithm demonstration capabilities and can teach programming concepts through its education-oriented user interface.
The garden can visualize computer science concepts such as search algorithms or graph coloring, and can also act as a real-time volume meter and respond to music. Check out videos of the garden in action!
Sanneman, Lindsay and Ajilo, Deborah and DelPreto, Joseph and Mehta, Ankur and Miyashita, Shuhei and Poorheravi, Negin Abdolrahim and Ramirez, Cami and Yim, Sehyuk and Kim, Sangbae and Rus, Daniela
