Friday, December 18

Tele-Haptic Proto-Sculpting: Using Robots To Teach

Is it possible to effectively communicate tactile pedagogical messages in a heuristic tele-haptic proto-sculpting environment? Let’s try rephrasing that. What if you could use a robot to help teach someone a creative skill? Imagine guiding someone’s hand with a paintbrush. Now imagine guiding a bunch of peoples’ hands with paintbrushes, using a series of linked robots.

From [Morgan Rauscher] comes Art-Bot 2.0 — a creative learning tool that provides an entirely new way to teach painting, sculpting, or pretty much anything requiring dexterity or a tool. We covered Art-Bot 1.0 a few years ago, but in case you’ve forgotten, it was an eight-foot tall chainsaw wielding robot inside of an enclosure. Even children, using the remote, could play with chainsaws.

Constructed with the help of the Hexagram Institute, Art-Bot 2.0 is made up of three rugged servo driven robot arms. One is for the teacher, to guide movements, one performs those same movements on a work-piece, and a third robot arm allows a student to feel what is happening.

A small haptic feedback pad on the arm even provides a sensation of touch to the students hand.

This is basically an extension of the technology [Wolf Tronix] showed us last week, on feeling force through a servo.

Is this the way people will learn certain hands-on skills in the future? What do you think?


Filed under: robots hacks

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