Our research group visited Tallinn Healthcare College to study their learning environment and readiness to experiment with telepresence robots in simulated hospital situations. We were admitted by solid team including rector of College Ülle Ernits, head of Chair of Nursing Kristi Puusepp et ali.

The training environment of the College appeared fully friendly for deployment of telepresence robots and we even succeeded to run few ad hoc experimental situations in group training process.

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Our research group activity drew attention of one of the most popular newspapers in Estonia and “Postimees” published an article named “Can’t attend the event yourself? No problem, telepresence robot can”. The article was discussed on the television the next day and we are very happy about that, however the host skipped the “read the article yourself” homework and remained wondering what the application of telepresence robots might be. We would be more than glad to explain that in many details should we be given an opportunity.

Aleksei, Janika and Kristel from our research group gave a workshop on telepresence robotics to 50 general education teachers in Tallinn University on the 1st November. Together we explored the functionality and limitations of the Double 3, Ohmni and Temi robots. Teachers were moderately optimistic of imaging their future in telepresence mode.

Temi, a newcomer to our fleet of Double 3 and Ohmni robots made its first (incredibly positive) appearance. More details on this guy below.

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In addition to the participation in the seminar we visited Dr. Ismail Khalil and Dr. Karin Anna Hummel from the Institute of Cooperation of Johannes Kepler University research interests lay within human-machine and machine-machine interaction, and also IoT sensors. We share the belief that telepresence robots could strongly benefit from the results of Ismail and Karin research.

Professor Zsolt Lavicza our research group met the next day shared his considerations on STEM education research methods that our EuroteQ course on social interactions using telepresence robots will greatly benefit from. We are looking forward to future cooperation.

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On the 16th of June we hosted a kick-off meeting for a project we named PYNT - Present Yet Not There. Yes, we know about consecution and the order of words in a sentence, but it’s more fun this way.

We see the main idea of PYNT in creating an international community of both research institutions and end-users who are interested in developing and promoting different types of remote communication methods and in particular, robotics.

We concentrate our research on applications of telepresence robots in higher education, teaching didactics, and assisting people with special needs. Our main partners and teaching institutions and research organizations, we are also looking forward to developing cooperation with telepresence robots manufacturers, as we do not see any model that would meet all the requirements educational robots impose. We promote our research though the Euroteq University course, workshops and consulting.

ReSTELA is an acronym for Remote STEM Labs and a joint project between TalTech IT College (that’s us), European Centre for Emerging Competencies and Technologies and Scuola di Robotica.

What we plan to do: we create robotics labs, where students can parcitipate remotely. Current plan includes a compact computer that can ba accessed using some remote connection protocol (VNC, RDP etc.) connected to a programmable microcontrolled with sensors and actuators. In addition to remotely programming the controller student will have a feedback of his/her actions using a camera installed over the working surface.

Obviously, the initial setup should be done by an assistant, apart from that we expect the students to work with programmable controllers independently and remotely.

Things we love about the project: the outputs of our combined efforts will be freely available for all parties interested, including full description of the platform and materials as well as detailed description of the labs we create.