Daran robot, a reconfigurable, powerful, and affordable robotic platform for STEM education

Abstract

<p style='text-indent:20px;'>Robot and programming education, as a key part of STEM education, is attracting more and more attention in the education industry. In this paper, a novel open-sourced educational robotic platform, <i>Daran</i> robot, is proposed with key features in terms of reconfigurable, powerful, and affordable. As an entry-level robotic platform, the <i>Daran</i> robot consists of three individual robots, which are a Mecanum-wheeled robot, a three-wheeled robot, and a 4-DoF robot arm. Both graphical and Python programming environments are developed for students with different entry levels. Thanks to the reconfigurability, four classic constructions of the <i>Daran</i> robot are presented with corresponding case studies, based on which the students can practically learn basic knowledge of sensing and control technologies.</p>