Socially Responsible Engineering Education Through Assistive Robotics Projects: The RoboWaiter Competition

This paper proposes an approach to promote students’ social awareness as part of challenging projects in robot design. A new robot contest was developed to motivate and focus these projects: RoboWaiter, the first international robot competition in the rapidly growing area of assistive robotics. RoboWaiter has been held since 2009 in Hartford, Connecticut in conjunction with the annual international Trinity College Fire-Fighting Home Robot Contest. We describe how dialogue among the authors and members of the Connecticut Council on Developmental Disabilities (CTCDD) directed development of RoboWaiter and led the CTCDD actively to participate in the organization and execution of the contest. We discuss the assignment and rules of the competition as well as the engineering challenges associated with designing robots for RoboWaiter. We also present responses of contest participants, both engineering students and people with disabilities. These reflections indicate that the challenge of creating a fetch-and-carry robot raised curiosity among engineering students and increased their interest in participating in the project. Moreover, the RoboWaiter project helped students to recognize the social challenge of assistive robotics and to understand that engineering work has importance beyond pure technical achievement. Participation of people with disabilities in the robot contest was motivated by the wish to draw public attention to the need for new assistive technologies and to inspire socially responsible education in universities and schools.