Dawn Robotics, a business based in the Technology Business Incubator at the Bristol Robotics Laboratory, has won a start-up grant from Jisc as part of its Elevator open innovation platform to develop its Raspberry Pi camera kit for use in schools.
Dawn Robotics director Alan Broun initially devised a low cost Raspberry Pi camera kit to help people learn how to build a robot and develop programming skills. He is excited at the potential this new funding will bring, in the hope it will enable more students in schools and universities to learn programming using robots.
Alan commented: “Programming can be a rather dry and abstract subject. Robotics is a great way to show that digital programming can have real world effects.”
The Raspberry Pi is a powerful computer which can be used for computer vision and advanced Autonomous Intelligence. The Dawn Robotics camera robot kit is a platform for the Raspberry Pi that students can expand and adapt to conduct their own research.
Owen White, one of the judges of the technology start-ups category in Jisc’s 2015 Summer of Student Innovation competition, said: “Alan has developed a series of apps that enable students to control their robot and – what really impressed us – he has already sold 700 of the kits online, not just to university students but also to older school-age students and to members of the general public. That proves that the idea has broad appeal and he is capitalising on this by working with a number of universities that offer outreach programmes into colleges and schools.”
Dawn Robotics will now begin development of freely available educational materials to use alongside the robot in the form of lesson plans exploring different aspects of robotics, combined with tutorials and example programs that students can follow themselves.
Alan concluded: “We believe that it is important to have low cost affordable robots that students can do real and useful research on, and go from the stage where they are learning about robotics and programming to actually performing useful research themselves. Our kit will inspire younger students in schools to become the roboticists of the future.”
