Hello everybody!

We are Guillem, Helena, Jordi, Kate and Luis and we participate in the “Bioinspired / Social robots and IoT: an example of a cloud robotics system” project. Next, we are going to explain you some of our experiences and feelings.

Our project is carried out in La Salle Campus Barcelona (Universitat Ramon Llull). It takes us approximately 30 minutes to get there from the Penyafort residence where we are staying. When we first arrived there, we had a tour around the University, which we found to be truly modern, well-appointed and full of great sport facilities.

After the tour, we went to the place where we were supposed to work in our project and there we met our teachers: Dr. Jordi Albo-Canals and Alexandre Barco. We started our day with an introduction to robotics and bioinspired robots. Dr. Jordi Albo-Canals gave us a lecture devoted to the robot design process, its architecture, purpose, communication issues, human factors in robotics, the importance of the engagement with the user and ethical questions in robotics. We got to learn about the most famous modern robots.

Our aim is to design and implement a biologically inspired robot to solve a specific problem identifiable in our society, and connect it to an internet network. Therefore, we had to think about a social issue and how to solve it using robotics. At the end, each of us came up with an idea of our own robot, which we will be building during the following week. 

After lunch we shared our ideas with each other and started making layouts (prototypes) of our future robots using constructor LEGO Mindstorms EV3. This task was really interesting and needed us to be extremely concentrated and focused on the design of our robots.

We reckon that it was hard to get an idea of a bioinspired robot to solve a specific task. For most of us, it was also the first time to construct our own robot, therefore it was a challenge. We learnt that Robotics is a technology that involves many other fields such as sociology, philosophy, engineering, computer science, ethics, biology, physiology, psychology and industrial design.

We are really looking forward to the next workshop because we are going to design the structure of our robot in a 3D designer and then we will print using a 3D printer.

We will let you know about our progress. See you soon!