This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I project focuses on the invention of standards, wireless electronics and multi-layered programming environments that will enable a range of robotic devices across multiple companies to be programmed by the public for educational and entertainment purposes. Furthermore, this project aims to design and deploy a community cyber-learning space where individuals and groups can publicize, share, and inspire creative robot applications. The plan for this Phase I component of the project is to create a working system - Brainlink, including a wireless tether module, a connector and communication standard that results from discussions with robotics companies, a software environment and an application sharing website. Once completed, this system will be tested with students in a month-long usage study and demonstrated to robotics companies to gauge interest in the resultant work.
The Brainlink system, if adopted by the robotics industry, will broadly impact both the personal robotics market and computer science and engineering education. Consider for a moment the implications significant adoption of the Brainlink system would have for computer science education. Past research suggests that many students desire for computer science education to be more application oriented and relevant. If successful, students as young as ten will be able to program their toys for specific applications relevant to their own lives. Furthermore, the system provides a practical venue for sharing applications; students may feel that their created applications are highly relevant if they can share them with millions of others. Economic impacts could be significant as well: Brainlink can act as a catalyst for growth in the consumer robot market. Though most consumers may not directly program their own robots, enabling all robots with Brainlink will allow these consumers to benefit from the applications created by an army of developers and students. These applications could greatly boost the entertainment, educational, and utilitarian value of robots generally and ultimately cause significant growth in this market.
We seek to connect the intrinsically rich hardware of current robots with the computational ecosystem found in many homes. We believe that consumer and toy robots should interoperate with computers, smartphones, video game consoles, and other computational devices, and that by so doing, robots will become more useful, educational, and entertaining. Our solution, dubbed Brainlink, involves three separate components and design efforts: A wireless tether that connects robots to a host computer. An open-source development environment that allows programs to be created that control the robots but run on a computer or smartphone. An application sharing website where robot applications are available to be downloaded by other users. This NSF grant allowed us to create a prototype version of this system. We created a Brainlink tether that can be mounted to all existing toy and consumer robots (see pictures), a software environment that allows the programming of these robots in Java, and a website that allows sharing of created robot applications at www.brainlinksystem.com. The system was used by 16 high school and college students who are currently taking Computer Science classes. These students were each provided with a robot and a Brainlink tether that they used for one month. Students created on average 2-3 programs during this month, and collectively uploaded 33 applications to the website. All students created at least one application despite being provided with no external incentives to do. Some students reported spending as much as 70 hours using the robot over the course of the month, and programmed their robots every day. Nearly every toy and consumer robot works with an infrared remote control, and our tether design leverages this fact. The Brainlink tether consists of a bluetooth module to connect the tether to a host computer or smartphone, an IR LED which is used to send commands to the robot, a number of features on-board to expand the capabilities of the robot, and expansion ports to allow customization of the robot hardware. Taken together with the software environment, users will be able to repurpose toy and consumer robots and program them with behaviors and capabilities that were impossible out of the box. We anticipate releasing a Brainlink tether design commercially by fall of this year, and hope that it will allow students, teachers, and hobbyists to find educational value in robots that were previously designed for entertainment only.
