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.

This Thursday, we had a pleasant opportunity to host a meeting with a number of visitors from different countries, including Piedad Tolmos Rodríguez-Piñero from King Juan Carlos University, Madrid, Spain; Sirpa Laitinen-Vaananen from Jamk University of Applied Sciences, Finland;Branko Andij from Johannes Kepler University, Linz, Austria, and Simon Molnár from Óbuda University, Budapest, Hungary. Most of our staff were also there, resulting in a lively discussion and some ideas for future cooperation.

iduEDU is an educational festival in Tallinn Seconday School of Science, where our group took part this year.

The workshop titled “What if the teacher comes to the class as a robot?” brought in about a dozen people and resulted in a lively discussion. Janika Leoste, who was physically in Norway, telepresented herself via a Double 3 robot. Due to shortage of robots Jaanus and Kaido were present in person, however the perceived difference was pretty marginal 🙂