Design and Preliminary In-Classroom Evaluation of a Low-Cost Educational Mobile Robot

The design and evaluation of a low-cost educational mobile robot are presented in this paper. The robot is composed of a two-wheeled actuated platform, equipped with distance, position and inertial sensors and a programmable micro-controller. Several prototypes of the robot were built and tested in a specially organised learning session with children to explore the feasibility of the robot as an educational tool to teach robotics and programming. Collected user feedback demonstrated that the proposed system is comparable to commercially available educational robots in terms of functionality and performance.