Sluggish sales may have kept a few robots resting on store shelves, but it hasn’t slowed kids’ enthusiasm for those magical gadgets that do everything from welding to helping an elderly person pick up a mug of coffee.
And if the success of both sessions of Fordham University’s two-week robotics camp and similar summer programs is any indication, the industry’s future looks especially bright.
The camp, created by
Fordham’s RETC Center for Professional Development, Department of Computer and Information Sciences (CIS) in collaboration with Yonkers, N.Y., public schools, is partly funded by a $650,000 U.S. Department of Energy grant to foster robotics research and education in The Bronx.
In addition to funding the camp, the government grant will help local K-12 educators integrate LEGO robotics and other technology into their curricula. Right now plans are underway to expand the summer robotics program as a yearlong program at South Bronx schools, said Kraig DeMatteis, a technical and curriculum developer for RETC.
“The grant will be used in the local community to enhance math and science skills,” DeMatteis said.
Like other robotics camps from Bangor, Maine to Jacksonville, Florida, at Fordham, kids build bots while learning how apply math and science with cool results.
At the Fordham camp, students worked with LEGO MINDSTORMS Education NXT robots. Save for weekly trips to the zoo or park, kids spend most of their time in a hands-on environment, learning how robots complete tasks. Activities included witnessing a demonstration of sophisticated robots at Fordham’s Robotics and Computer Vision Laboratory. Within a couple of weeks, they were put into work in groups, where they could design and build their own unique ’bots.
Still, it’s hard to ignore news that a number of robots that are out of work, especially in Japan: Overall shipments of industrial robots fell 59 percent in the first quarter of 2009, according to a report published by the
Japan Robot Association.
Yaskawa, Japan’s largest maker of industrial robots reported that profit sunk two-thirds to 6.9 billion yen ($72 million), in the year ended March 20.