Using Programmable Drone in Educational Projects and Competitions

Autor: Petrovič, Pavel, Verčimák, Peter
Rok vydání: 2024
Předmět:
Zdroj: Proceedings of EDULEARN23 Conference 3rd-5th July 2023, Palma, Mallorca, Spain, ISBN: 978-84-09-52151-7
Druh dokumentu: Working Paper
DOI: 10.21125/edulearn.2023.1472
Popis: The mainstream of educational robotics platforms orbits the various versions of versatile robotics sets and kits, while interesting outliers add new opportunities and extend the possible learning situations. Examples of such are reconfigurable robots, rolling sphere robots, humanoids, swimming, or underwater robots. Another kind within this category are flying drones. While remotely controlled drones were a very attractive target for hobby model makers for quite a long time already, they were seldom used in educational scenarios as robots that are programmed by children to perform various simple tasks. A milestone was reached with the introduction of the educational drone Tello, which can be programmed even in Scratch, or some general-purpose languages such as Node.js or Python. The programs can even have access to the robot sensors that are used by the underlying layers of the controller. In addition, they have the option to acquire images from the drone camera and perform actions based on processing the frames applying computer vision algorithms. We have been using this drone in an educational robotics competition for three years without camera, and after our students have developed several successful projects that utilized a camera, we prepared a new competition challenge that requires the use of the camera. In the article, we summarize related efforts and our experiences with educational drones, and their use in the student projects and competition.
Comment: This work was co-funded by the Horizon-Widera-2021 European Twinning project TERAIS G.A. n. 101079338. Open Access code and data described in the paper are available at: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.10715699 and https://github.com/RoboCup-Junior-Slovensko/softverova-podpora/tree/master/drone-robocup2023
Databáze: arXiv