A handful of University students’ idealistic internship allowed them not only to serve the local community but also to put their classroom skills to the test over the summer.
University students teamed up with local non-profit organization Louisiana Assistive Technology Access Network, LATAN, to program a robot that will help children with special needs.
So far, the students have programmed the robot “Buddy” to put its hand over its chest and recite the pledge of allegiance. They are also trying to program the robot to play Candy Land.
University coordinator for the robotics engineering minor, Marcio de Queiroz, sent an email to all students with the minor to ask if they wanted to intern with LATAN and help program the robot.
“Autistic kids are very responsive to technology,” he said. “They socialize better with machines than humans.”
De Queiroz said the robotics engineering minor is growing, though it just started last fall with almost 70 students.
LATAN purchased Buddy from a French company called Aldebaran Robotics. Initially, the robot’s programming was primitive, which is why LATAN reached out to the University.
Computer science senior Jonathan Nguyen worked on the robot over the summer and said LATAN outlined goals for Buddy and the students accomplished them.
“[We] would start by looking at what Buddy’s abilities and limitations are for those tasks and delegate topics for each team member to focus on for the next week,” Nguyen said.
University students began programming the robot in June. It has since turned into a project for students taking the introduction to robotics course.
De Queiroz said LATAN intends to use Buddy as a teaching assistant to help children with special needs.
Nguyen said Buddy will assist teachers with watching the children while they help other students.
“Robots like Buddy can be the one-on-one companion for the kids who might need individual attention,” he said.
Even though the robot was named prior to the student’s internship, Nguyen said the name is fitting.
“It’s one thing to design and program a machine to do something like playing a board game with a child, but it’s another to put a kind of humanity into that machine,” he said.
There is one robot in Baton Rouge, and LATAN has recently bought another one to begin programming.
Nguyen said that assistive robots have the potential to become affordable and accessible.
“They aren’t too widely available yet, so work like ours is part of showing what robots like Buddy can do while also discovering how we can improve on them,” he said.