Abstract
This paper reports on RoboWaiter, the first contest in assistive robotics organized and managed with active participation of people with disabilities. RoboWaiter was offered in conjunction with the Trinity College Firefighting Home Robot Contest in 2009 and 2010. Members of the sponsoring organization, the Connecticut Council on Developmental Disabilities, worked closely with Trinity to formulate the contest theme and rules. RoboWaiter offers participants a unique challenge of multidisciplinary design projects that culminate in the competition held in Connecticut. RoboWaiter’s main goals are to promote awareness of the needs of people with disabilities and to provide an engineering design challenge for all levels from middle school to Ph.D. students and engineering professionals. The contest also sought to encourage students to consider social dimensions of the engineering profession. In this paper we describe the RoboWaiter rules and the resulting engineering challenges, provide an assessment of progress so far, and consider future directions.
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Ahlgren, D.J., Verner, I.M. (2010). RoboWaiter Competition: Linking Robotics Education to Social Responsibility. In: Vadakkepat, P., et al. Trends in Intelligent Robotics. FIRA 2010. Communications in Computer and Information Science, vol 103. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-15810-0_35
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-15810-0_35
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