Students are Quick to Learn Programming a Robot

A few weeks ago, students from the Master’s program Business Information Systems challenged themselves to learn programming a social robot within the course Optimization for Business Improvement taught by Prof. Dr. Rolf Dornberger.

For this task, they were given a robot called NAO. Many of the students had never even interacted with a robot before, let alone programmed one. Thus, this was a unique experience. After getting a programming crash course, the students began exploring various functions of the robot to see what use cases are possible. Some of those functions were, for instance, speech and face recognition, locomotion etc.

Finally, after just two hours of programming, the students were able to present the first two entertaining and convincing use cases: (1) a robot receptionist that would make room reservations and take drink orders and (2) a robot celebrating a guest’s birthday.

Reflections

The students admitted that while this was a very exciting experience, there were also some unnerving times. Working with robots requires not only interest in the field but also a great amount of patience. They learned that, as with all technology, things tend to happen at the least expected moment, e.g., the network connection can disappear or the robot can become unresponsive until rebooted.

Nevertheless, when time came to present the results, everything worked and both the students and the observers were pleased. In a short amount of time these students had learned about social robots and were able to bring a little idea to life all on their own.