MID 2014-15

During the first part of the interdisciplinary science of engineering in English project on robotics, 2F form students at LP2I (France) worked on research in robotics.
They wrote some articles and recorded some radio shows with Spanish partners during our meeting in France in November 2014.

The outcome of the second part of the project was a slide show presentation.
Students were split in small groups and worked on four main topics:
1 Robots in movies : students had to analyse scenes of I, Robot, adapted from Isaac Asimov’s stories and had to focus on the main robot characters of three famous movies, namely Sonny, from I, Robot, Tinman from The Wizard of Oz, Data from Star Trek Next Generation. They were also free to study a robot of their choice. They had to research each character, analyse their personality and describe the differences and similarities between the four of them.
2 Robots in literature : after having chosen to read between Evidence and Liar, two of Isaac Asimov’s short stories , students had to write a critique of the chosen story.
3 Designing a robot : students had to imagine and draw a robot, then they had to explain what it does, how it works, why it is indispensable to mankind, so they had to use technical vocabulary they had seen in Science of Engineering specifically.
4 Building and programming Mindstrom NXT robots: students had to program a robot so that it would avoid obstacles and show it to the class.
During oral presentations (watch the videos below) students used their slide shows to present the work done on the four subjects.


Robots at Futuroscope

In December 2014 French students studying one robotscience of engineering subject visited the technical room of “Dance with robots” attraction at the Futuroscope theme park, next to Poitiers.

 

Nathan, in his article,  explains some technical problems that engineers have to deal with in this kind of attractions.

 

Robotics departement at SP2MI (Fr)

SP2MI is a scientific part of the Univesity of Poitiers. Theresp2mi are a lot of very modern scientific labs at SP2MI and on the 12th Nov 2014 (mobility in France) we could visit the robotics lab.

 

Students could meet a scientific researcher that explained them his work. They could see some robots that they learned about preparing their radio programmes.
The most interesting robot was the one you can see beneath. This robot can paint the picture of anybody and it does it quite well (as you can see.).

robot_painter1robot_painter2robot_painter