The HumanoidLab

Involving Students in a Research Centre Through an Educational Initiative

Guillem Aleny

, Jos

e Luis Rivero

, Aleix Rull

, Patrick Grosch

and Sergi Hern

andez

Institut de Rob

otica i Inform

atica Industrial (CSIC-UPC), Llorens i Artigas 4-6, 08028 Barcelona, Spain

Open Source Robotics Foundation, 419 N Shoreline Blvd, Mountain View, CA 94043, U.S.A.

Keywords:

Project based Learning, Mentoring, Humanoid Robots, Introduction to Research.

Abstract:

The HumanoidLab is a more than 5 year old activity aimed to use educational robots to approach students

to our Research Centre. Different commercial educative humanoid platforms have been used to introduce

students to different aspects of robotics using projects and offering guidance and assistance. About 40 students

have performed small mechanics, electronics or programming projects that are used to improve the robots by

adding features. Robotics competitions are used as a motivation tool. A two weeks course was started that

has received 80 undergraduate students, and more than 100 secondary school students in a short version. The

experience has been very positive for students and for the institution: some of these students have performed

their scholar projects and research in robotics and continue enrolled in the robotics ﬁeld, and some of them are

currently in research groups at IRI.

1 INTRODUCTION

The Institut de Rob

otica i Inform

atica Industrial

(IRI) is a joint research centre between Spanish Re-

search Council (CSIC) and Universitat Polit

ecnica de

Catalunya (UPC). In 2007, a SWOT analysis revealed

that there was a lack of capacity to involve new stu-

dents, principally undergraduate and Master students.

IRI is located into one of the UPC university campus,

but it was relatively unconnected from university ac-

tivities and the visibility of IRI research areas in the

university was very small.

With this in mind, in 2007 the HumanoidLab ini-

tiative was created with these objectives:

• Introduce engineering, compute science, and

mathematics students to robotics.

• Promote multidisciplinarity in students’ educa-

tion.

• Increase the number of students in the IRI

Robotics Laboratory.

• Increase the visibility of IRI research activities in

the university community.

• Contribute to the community with open software

and hardware projects.

Undergraduate educational robotics can be di-

vided in three areas: robotic clubs, formal university

courses, and collaboration into a research project. The

HumanoidLab initiative combines a bit all three.

In the ﬁrst place, some Universities and Research

institutions host robotic clubs grouped under dif-

ferent initiatives, like student sections of the IEEE

Aerospace and Electronic Systems Society (AESS)

or the Board of European Students of Technology

(BEST)

. These clubs are maintained by students and

usually base their activity in organize or participate

at national or international robotic competitions, like

Eurobot

(that takes place from 1998). This com-

petitions propose a set of challenges, and each team

designs and builds custom robots with different me-

chanic, electronic and software solutions. The Hu-

manoidLab wanted to use competitions as motivation

tool, but not as primary objective.

In the second place, regular robotic courses in-

volving engineering topics are common (Matari,

2004; Rus, 2006), where simple robots are assembled

and programmed with basic reactive algorithms. A

good idea to focus the efforts in software development

is to use standard and non-expensive robot platforms.

In this line, undergraduate experiences using LEGO

and AIBO have been reported (Sklar et al., 2007),

http://ieee-aess.org/

http://www.best.eu.org/

http://www.eurobot.org/

213

Alenyà G., Rivero J., Rull A., Grosch P. and Hernández S..

The HumanoidLab - Involving Students in a Research Centre Through an Educational Initiative.

DOI: 10.5220/0004850502130220

In Proceedings of the 6th International Conference on Computer Supported Education (CSEDU-2014), pages 213-220

ISBN: 978-989-758-021-5

 2014 SCITEPRESS (Science and Technology Publications, Lda.)

and more recently using Roomba based robots like

the TurtleBot (Gerkey and Conley, 2011). However,

in these platforms is sometimes difﬁcult to embed

more sophisticated computer science topics that un-

derlie perception, planning, and control mechanisms

in modern robots (Touretzky, 2012). We liked the idea

of using robot kits because they provide a quick start

platform for people interested principally in program-

ming, but we also wanted to keep the freedom to cus-

tomize and replace mechanical and electronic parts,

and embedded software.

In the third place, there are lots of students col-

laborating on scientiﬁc projects at university depart-

ments, but this is usually not performed as a formal

educational activity further than master theses and

undergraduate works. Besides, departments and re-

search groups have the capacity to participate in com-

petitions that require complex and expensive equip-

ment. Maxwell (Maxwell and Meeden, 2000) re-

ported an intensive summer project where 10 un-

dergraduate students should collaborate to develop a

complex robot used to serve hors d’oeuvres in a so-

phisticated manner. The RoboCup competitions

founded in 1997, promote teams involving students

not only on the classical soccer competition but more

recently the rescue leagues (from 2001) and in the

robocup@home (from 2006). On 2010 it engaged

more that 3000 participants from 500 different teams.

We considered these activities interesting because

they are long term projects where hardware and soft-

ware platforms are evolved during different years and

where collaboration and code reuse is promoted. We

also wanted that the students could have the oppor-

tunity of develop their Master thesis, undergradu-

ate projects, and collaboration grants under the Hu-

manoidLab.

In this paper, the HumanoidLab initiative is de-

scribed and the results of 5 years of activity are eval-

uated.

2 METHODOLOGY

The HumanoidLab group decided to use small hu-

manoid robots in all the activities. Time has revealed

that this was a key decision because provided us with

a distinctive position. In our area of inﬂuence, there

was a moderate activity in university and bachelor de-

grees using wheeled robots, but we were the ﬁrst us-

ing humanoids. Humanoids were (and are) a growing

topic in the robotics community and give the oppor-

tunity to work both in software and hardware and do

http://www.robocup.org/

(a) Original Robonova robot (b) Twiki robot

Figure 1: Twiki robot includes many modiﬁcations devel-

oped as student projects, as additional d.o.f. at legs, pan-tilt

unit, foot pressure sensors, color camera, Gumstix process-

ing unit, improved battery system, and a new C program-

ming library.

it in a wide range of different areas: mechanics, elec-

tronics, perception, locomotion, kinematics, manipu-

lation, etc. International market offers the possibility

to get a fully working educational small humanoid by

a reasonable price (800Eur) and consequently with a

reduced funding the HumanoidLab could start their

activities. Most of the activities use these educational

humanoid robots as a base, and foster their capabili-

ties by adding new features.

The project has 4 project administrators, each one

specialized in a different area: mechanics, electronics,

low level programming, and perception and planning.

Each administrator is the responsible for an activity

and for different groups of students. As robotics is

multidisciplinar, the tight collaboration between dif-

ferent administrators is usually required and is ac-

tively promoted in the group. The HumanoidLab is

developing 5 different kinds of activities that are de-

tailed below.

2.1 Small Projects

This is the main activity. It involves a small group of

students, between 2 and 3, and it is performed dur-

ing the scholar University period. We organize meet-

ings between students and some of the administrators

to determine the previous knowledge of the students,

the topic that they would like to work with, and the

time that they could spent. Project administrators pro-

pose small projects that ﬁt in the current Humanoid-

Lab interests, and students can also propose their own

projects. Once an agreement about the project scope

and the execution time has been reached, the project

starts with the supervision of one administrator. Each

new project provides new capabilities to incremen-

tally obtain more complex and capable robots. In sec-

tion 3 a detailed list of some of the carried out projects

is presented.

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2.2 Competitions

Competitions are not a goal by itself, but an oppor-

tunity to put in practice and show the progress of

some projects. The HumanoidLab regularly presents

some student teams that after the competition write

a report (Pons et al., 2010). As it is not a cen-

tral goal, can happen that the proposed solutions

are not the best suited to win the competition, but

serve to demonstrate new developments. A clear ex-

ample is the Twiki robot, who participated at the

2009 CEABOT competition. In the stairs challenge,

where stairs have to be recognized and traversed up

and down, Twiki used embedded computer vision

for obstacle avoidance and pressure sensors to detect

downstairs (Pegueroles and Simo-Serra, 2010) (see

Fig. 1(b) and 2(a)), while other competitors used sim-

ple and effective infra-red sensors. However, it was

recognized there as the most technological evolved

robot and get the second prize.

In the Spanish national scope, small humanoids

competitions are mostly reduced to one or two tour-

naments per year with events distributed on several

days. Each small humanoids contest is composed by

several challenges, which can be group into two main

categories, depending on what is especially required

to the robot:

• Mechanical skills: events designed to probe the

robot mechanic design and actuators. An example

of this kind its the stairs competition or the sumo

contest.

• Perception abilities: events oriented to resolve

problems using mainly the robot sensor capacity

on the environment. Obstacle race is a good ex-

ample of this category.

2.3 Introduction Course

UPC University offers the possibility to include a

workshop or activity as part of its studies plan. Get-

ting directly into the University studies and partici-

pate as an active member has been a good opportu-

nity to have contact with students. A two weeks in-

troductory course/workshop was designed, presented

and ﬁnally approved by the University. That was the

birth of ”Introduction to Humanoid Robotics” course.

Practice paid a role as important as theory. Partic-

ipation of students from different schools was one

of the strongest proposal points so multidisciplinary

teams could be composed. The kind of robots used to

perform the practical assignments has evolved from

the beginning, and currently from 8 to 10 customized

Bioloid robots are used. A maximum of 2 students

for each available robot that we have is allowed to

(a) (b)

Figure 2: Pressure sensors and pan-and-tilt unit on a

Robonova robot.

join this course at each edition. The course takes

4 hours by day, that is a total amount of 40 hours

per course. Past students came from Computer Sci-

ence, Mechanical Engineering, Electronics, Mathe-

matics and Physics areas.

After the great success of this activity we have

been asked to propose a shorter introduction activ-

ity, of about 2 hours of duration. We have used this

shorter activity as outreach in local conferences, sec-

ondary school visits, and the European robotics week

activities. We have made an effort to develop libraries

and tools to facilitate the access to this technology to

all kinds of students. Nowadays, the requirements to

participate in this course are very basic: knowing the

concepts of variable, conditional and loop.

Based on the Introduction course we have also for-

malized a course in a set of 5 sessions for secondary

school teachers, that gives them knowledge and pro-

poses activities to introduce robotics in the secondary

school curriculum.

2.4 Curricular Projects

After its participation in some of the Humanoid-

Lab activities, some students decide to perform their

curricular projects with us, and sometimes in other

robotic groups at the IRI institute. They are basically

the ﬁnal career project (PFC) and the Master Thesis

(MTh), but also some undergraduate courses assign-

ments. Some of the works that where performed di-

rectly in our group are detailed in Sec. 3.

2.5 Outreach Activities

We have participated in some outreach activities. We

have performed some talks at Open Software confer-

ences and to secondary school teachers. we have par-

ticipated at robot exhibitions like Robot exhibition at

Sonar 2010 (Barcelona), IRC 2010 (Korea), and Fi-

comic (2012). We have appeared on TV and radio

programs, and also appeared several times in local

newspapers. We regularly participate in the Science

Week and in 2012 also in the EU robotics week.

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(a) IR foot sensors to

detect up and down

stairs

(b) Rotating IR sensor at the

head

Figure 3: Two different modiﬁcations on the Bioloid robot.

Figure 4: New sensor board for the Bioloid robot.

3 PROPOSED PROJECTS

In ﬁve years there have been more that 20 small

projects performed. These involve different skills and

students have the opportunity to learn different as-

pects of robotics. A list of some them with code

is available on the developers site of the project

Here we list some of the most representative, from the

beginning of the project to the latest developments.

Along each project it is speciﬁed whether it was an

students project, a grant, curricular works or coordi-

nators project. We have identiﬁed that keeping coor-

dinators motivation is important, and maintain some

challenging projects is a good mechanism for such.

3.1 Robonova

The Robonova platform is a 16 dof robot (Fig. 1(a)).

It has an embedded micro-controller and can be pro-

grammed using a basic-like programming language.

It has some analog channels available to use simple

sensors.

Inverse Kinematics (students project). This was

one of the ﬁrst activities, deﬁned as a software project.

The objective was to deﬁne the equations of the

http://apollo.upc.es/humanoide/

Inverse Kinematics (IK) of both arms and legs of

the robot, and to implement the corresponding algo-

rithms.

Motivation. IK is important to switch from motions

based on pre-computed positions to the complete con-

trol over the motion range.

Organization. A group of three students was formed,

with complementary knowledge on mathematics an

engineering. The project required about 150 hours of

work, and 20 hours of supervision based on regular

meetings.

Evaluation. Administrators did not correctly evalu-

ated the previous knowledge of the students, and the

project required more time than expected. Student

were moderately satisﬁed because they had the op-

portunity to learn the mathematical background of se-

rial robot kinematics, and the different solutions. One

student left the group, and a new project was assigned

to the other two in a pure software project following

their concerns. An issue was that the project could not

be fully completed because the algorithm could not

run on the embedded micro-controller. Consequently,

the ﬁnal evaluation was performed in simulation. This

motivated the deﬁnition of a new electronics project

for the addition of a new computing unit.

Extra Dof for Robot Legs (student project). This

is a hardware project to modify the leg architecture

to allow the inclusion of an extra rotational degree-

of-freedom while maintaining almost the same robot

height (Fig. 1(b)). This was necessary to not compro-

mise the overall equilibrium.

Motivation. The original Robonova robot has 5 dof

at each leg (Fig. 1(a)). Consequently, turns are only

possible taking advantage of foot slippage, that is im-

precise and with low repeatability.

Organization. The project was assigned to one stu-

dent with interest in mechanical engineering. The

minimum requirements were deﬁned, and the student

presented different alternatives that were evaluated,

and the best one was implemented on a real robot.

The project required about 200 hours of work, and 20

hours of supervision based on regular meetings. The

help of the workshop personnel (20 hours) was cru-

cial.

Evaluation. The evaluation was based on the ob-

tained mobility executed by the real robot, and the re-

peatability of the turning motion. The student found

this project as a great opportunity to improve his abil-

ities in mechanical design an related software. He

continued in the group, and is now one of the super-

visors. The design was published as open source in

our website, and several other groups presented simi-

lar designs in the next robotics competition.

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Feet Pressure Sensors (student project). In a previ-

ous project a new foot to place force-resistance sen-

sors (FSR) in the bottom and the front, and its as-

sociated electronics (Fig 2(a)) was designed. In this

project, and thanks to a CSIC grant, a student per-

formed a formal study of the most convenient position

and and physical mounting of the sensors, and devel-

oped a calibration hardware and software (Barbadillo

and Aleny

a, 2010).

Motivation. Pressure sensors were used satisfacto-

rily in the skill of climbing up and down stairs. How-

ever, we wanted to used them to develop walking al-

gorithms, and more precision was required.

Organization. A single student performed the

project. The project was deﬁned taking into account

the student background in sensors and electronics. It

required 300 hours of dedication. The supervision

was based on regular meetings and took 10 hours.

Evaluation. A new evaluation method for us was in-

troduced in this project, based on deﬁning 4 different

intermediate checking points with the student. The

method worked very well, and let to assess different

evolution stages and evaluate the student . It is worth

to mention that the knowledge acquired by the stu-

dent was used in a subsequent research period he per-

formed in another institution (Barbadillo et al., 2011).

3.2 Bioloid

The Bioloid robot is a 18 dof humanoid robot (see

Fig. 3) made of modular parts that can be easily

changed. Compared to the Robonova, the motors

have more torque, and are protected against overload

damage. The micro-controller has also basic compu-

tation capabilities, and has some analog channels for

connecting simple sensors. It come equipped with a

small inertial unit intended to aid to the walking mo-

tions. The robot is relatively cheap (≈ 800$) so we

have 12 of such robots that are used in small projects

but also in the Introduction to Humanoids course and

related outreaching activities. A project was proposed

to add a new extension board (see Fig. 4) to expand

the robot controller with different buses and mount

new sensors, like a compass. Currently this project

has been transferred to a local company that will com-

mercialize it.

Human Motion Transfer (Master thesis). This

project uses a depth camera, based on the Time-of-

Flight principle, to acquire human motion of an op-

erator and transfer that motions to a Bioloid robot.

The student had to implement vision algorithms, 3D

segmentation, and implement a communication chan-

nel between the vision computer and the robot. Later,

with the appearance of Kinect based sensors, the hu-

man acquisition part has become more easy, and oth-

ers have reproduced this work using this sensor (Pfeif-

fer, 2011).

Motivation. The main objective is to develop a mech-

anism to create new robot movements that are human-

like and easy to create.

Organization. The project was assigned to a student

with interest to learn image processing algorithms and

interest in control. The project required 400 hours

of dedication divided in 3 different stages: 150 hours

working in the perception and body segmentation, 50

hours for the adaptation of the IK algorithms and the

communication with the robot, 150 hours developing

the graphical interface to acquire and reproduce mo-

tions, and the rest for writing. It required 35 hours

of supervision, and 10 extra hours to solve problems

with the image segmentation and robot communica-

tion.

Evaluation. This was a Master Thesis project. The

student published a report (Siscart, 2011), and the

work was publicly presented and evaluated by a jury.

The student received the highest qualiﬁcation. The

student was very satisﬁed because the project entailed

closing the perception-decision-control loop, and it

had the opportunity to learn perception algorithms.

3.3 Darwin

The Darwin robot (Fig 5) is a 18 dof platform that in-

cludes one micro-controller, an embedded PC running

Linux, a color camera and an inertial unit. The hard-

ware and the software is open source, and the inter-

action with the robot is using a C library. Compared

to Bioloid, Darwin has a complete PC inside and it

is capable of using more complex sensors like color

cameras. The architecture is also more robust. How-

ever, it costs approximately 10 times the price of a Bi-

oloid. We use this platform for small projects, but it

is not possible to have several and use them in the In-

troduction course. Again, with this platform it is also

possible to propose mechanical, electronic, and soft-

ware projects. For example, in the sensor part a depth

camera has been added(Fig 5), and different projects

have proposed different solutions to include grippers

(Fig 6(a)).

ROS Integration (coordinator project). Currently

the ROS framework is widely used and many robots

are supported, among others small humanoids. In

this project the necessary layers to interface the Dar-

winOP robot with ROS have been developed.

Motivation. The integration of the robot in the frame-

work enables the use of state-of-the-art algorithms

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implementations compatible with ROS, for example

for walking (Hornung et al., 2012).

Organization. This project was a coordinator initia-

tive, and assigned to a coordinator because it was a

long-term strategical project. It required 200 hours

to obtain the ﬁrst working version. In periodic co-

ordination meetings the evolution was presented and

discussed with the other coordinators. The software

has been published under LGPL license, following

the philosophy of the HumanoidLab. This project is

still alive, and requires 5 hours/month of a coordinator

for maintenance and to include new features.

Evaluation. The software has been presented in a

Darwin competition

. Other projects using this soft-

ware are being proposed, and are used to evaluate and

occasionally propose new improvements. The soft-

ware is also being used by other groups and we re-

ceive periodically questions and requirements for im-

provements that we try to answer.

3.4 Other

Leg Redesign (Master thesis). In this project we in-

vestigated how to build a custom pair of legs using

powerful motors. The student had to design all the

frames and mechanical parts, built the legs, and pro-

grammed them to obtain examples of walking gaits.

The overall size of the robot was 70cm.

Motivation. Evaluate the complexity and cost of

creating custom robot legs to build new robots from

scratch.

Organization. The project was assigned to a student

with interest in mechanics and hardware abilities. The

project required 400 hours of dedication, 30 hours of

supervision, and the assistance of the workshop per-

sonnel to use the machinery and tools to build the pro-

totype.

Evaluation. This was a Master Thesis project. The

student published a report (Cortada, 2010), and the

work was publicly presented and evaluated by a jury.

He received a high qualiﬁcation. The evaluation in-

cluded the demonstration of walking gaits and maxi-

mum weight capacity measures.

4 FUNDING

To support the activities of the HumanoidLab we have

received different kinds of funding. This has been pri-

marily used to acquire robotic platforms and equip-

ment like computers, additional sensors, and parts,

but also to travel to robotic competitions.

http://www.icra2012.org/program/robotChallenge.php

Figure 5: The DarwinOP robot has been modiﬁed with grip-

pers and a depth camera. The control system has been

completely rewritten to take advantage of the embedded

PC/micro-controller architecture.

(a) Simple gripper and addi-

tional dof

(b) 3-ﬁngered hand model cur-

rently being implemented

Figure 6: Different developments for giving the DarwinOP

robot the ability to grasp objects.

Generally students in the lab are volunteers. How-

ever, we have obtained funding for grants in three dif-

ferent programs. The ﬁrst was from the regional gov-

ernment and was intended to foster open source com-

munity. We obtained two student grants. The sec-

ond was from the Spanish Council of Investigation

in a program to introduce undergraduate students to

research. The third was a program to generate educa-

tional contents oriented to secondary school. In total

6 students have obtained a grant.

We started our activities with a reduced number

of robots, and we performed some with them small

projects and developments. However, this changed

when we decided to start the Introduction course and

the related outreach activities. More robots were

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needed to being able to make these activities, as we

planned to use one robot for each two students. We

obtained the rest of the robots we needed by buying

some new units, but also with a donation from a local

retailer.

The HumanoidLab has been mainly funded by

a program of the Polytechnic University of Catalo-

nia devoted to strength department activities with

20KEur. Currently, the IRI is funding the develop-

ments on the DarwinOP platform of the Humanoid-

Lab with an internal project of 15KEur.

5 EVALUATION

The Robotics Introduction Course has had a great suc-

cess. 80 students have participated in this intensive 2

weeks activity. After each course the opinions of the

students are summarized using reviews. Such reviews

reveal that before the course the knowledge about IRI

activities was 1 in a scale from 1 (unknown) to 7 (to-

tally known) and before was evaluated as 6. The same

applies for the knowledge of the HumanoidLab activi-

ties. Concerning the evaluation of the course, students

declare that will recommend the course to other col-

leagues between 6 and 7. Of such students, 5 have

performed their PFC in the Humanoid Lab and 1 in

another group.

The reviews also ask about knowledge acquired

in the course. Students consider that the concepts

learned will be useful in their career between 5 and

6. The reviews also include speciﬁc questions about

the concepts divided in 4 sections: (a) kinematics and

actuators, (b) sensors, (c) vision, and (d) robot pro-

gramming. Questions ask for the knowledge before

and after the course, and also the satisfaction after the

course. Students declare in (a), (b) and (d) a previ-

ous knowledge of 1-2, a present knowledge of 5-6,

and a satisfaction of 4-5. Surprisingly, regarding (c)

previous knowledge is declared the same 1-2, present

knowledge is declared low (3-4), but satisfaction is

declared high (5-6). We believe that this is because

the robots we are using are quite simple, but computer

vision are perceived as very powerful tools. Some

students have asked, in a free comment space, for a

speciﬁc activity about computer vision for robotics.

The Introduction course has been served as a ba-

sis for creating a course for secondary school teach-

ers, and also a short version is being currently used

for outreach activities of the IRI. More than 100 sec-

ondary school students have participated in this activ-

ity, always in collaboration with their teachers. Stu-

dents are in general very satisﬁed, and their teachers

have always expressed that the activity has been very

positive and helpful.

More than 40 students have been involved in small

projects, and contacted the HumanoidLab thanks to

word-of-mouth marketing. This has reported a wide

list of improvements to our platforms. Some of these

new features have been successfully adopted by other

groups working with the same robotic platforms.

Women in engineering and robotics are a minority,

at least in Spanish education system. Surprisingly, of

the 9 active students nowadays in the HumanoidLab

7 are women. We have been asked sometimes for the

reasons by researchers in Sociology, but unfortunately

we do not have yet the answer.

We have some special cases that is worth to men-

tion. Three former students of the HumanoidLab have

performed its PFC in one research group of the IRI,

and currently have become PhD students. One of

them is still involved with us and has become admin-

istrator. Additionally, 3 students have performed their

Master thesis in the HumanoidLab.

We have tracks of 3 former students performing

research activities related to robotics in research in-

stitutions in other countries.

Currently, we have a DarwinOP robot and 12 Bi-

oloid based robots working. Other robots have be-

come obsolete and no further development is per-

formed on them.

Even if it not an objective, participation in com-

petitions has been very successful. The ﬁrst year our

teams obtained the second and the fourth place at the

Spanish humanoid competition. The next year we

win the second place again, and in the two last com-

petitions the Humanoid Lab team has obtained the

ﬁrst place. These two teams are actually formed by

women.

We believe that, for being useful to the objectives

of the HumanoidLab initiative, the participation in

competitions should be conceived with the following

objectives in mind:

• Multidisciplinary collaboration: autonomous con-

tests requires always from both, hardware and

software, development. They represent a good

motivation to encourage collaboration between

groups of students performing different tasks in

order to get a robot working or improve them.

• Promote group spirit: since Humanoid Lab hosts

several group of students whom compose differ-

ent teams, some measures were taken to ensure

all people feels like belonging to the same orga-

nization. It was the tutor mission to explain new

teams that all the previous work they were using

was made by their co-workers at IRI, but rivals

during the competition. It’s a golden rule that any

prize won by any of the IRI teams is spent on

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improving robots and laboratory material. This

avoid any problem or ambition with respect to the

money and helps a lot on spreading the work re-

sults sharing. For competitions which imply dis-

placement to other cities, the own travel and coex-

istence helps a lot to create bonds among all stu-

dents, no matter what team they are.

• Provide long and mid-term explicit goals: the res-

olution of different competitions events can in-

spire both, tutors and students, in the search of

goals to reach. From an speciﬁc competition

challenge teams can start working on different

projects, from mechanical design to artiﬁcial in-

telligence algorithms, in order to be part of tour-

nament competitors.

6 CONCLUSIONS

The HumanoidLab initiative was funded to introduce

students to robotics and give visibility to the research

activities of IRI in the student community. After 5

years, nearly 100 undergraduate students have partic-

ipated in one of the organized activities. Of that, 40

have participated in long term activities. Several of

them have continued to work in robotics either in IRI

or elsewhere. It is worth to mention that 7 of the cur-

rent 9 students are women.

Using humanoid robots has revealed to be a good

decision, because of the distinction with other activi-

ties but also because the inherent problems are chal-

lenging. Historically different humanoid robots have

been used and improved using open hardware and

open source paradigms. The set of performed activ-

ities include small projects, curricular projects, com-

petitions, courses and outreach activities.

The synergies between mechanical and electronic

engineering, computer science, and mathematicians

has been very positive and have been explicitly pro-

moted.

Finally, as it is a volunteer activity it is important

to keep coordinator’s motivation. One suitable way

we have found is to propose challenging projects also

to the coordinators that allow to learn from other ar-

eas or expand their knowledge in new areas. How-

ever, it has to be taken into account that long term

projects, suitable to be assigned to a coordinator, can

require sustained dedication over the time, like soft-

ware maintenance.

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