Past 6th April 2018, Joan Ráez interviews Leopoldo Armesto in a Entrepreneurship blog site tuyyoemprendemos.com. We include the podcast with the interview and a summary.
Preguntas
How are you and what do you do for living?
I’m Leopoldo Armesto and I work at Universitat Politècnica de València as Lecturer. I have several courses on Robotics.
Tell us about your experience at the UPV
We have students of Grades, Masters and Doctorate. Each of them has degrees speciality, from generic courses to very specialized courses. Doctorate is oriented to research and to obtain a PhD.
DYOR (Do your own Robot). What is that?
It is a very interesting proposal, from my point of view, whose aim is to create a mobile robot based on a low-cost solution, between 60-70€, so that anyone can do it at home, no soldering is required. In some courses, they tipically use Lego robots (among others), but this is something that it is already done in Primary School and they have a lot of limitations (mostly the required budget and the amount of things to do).
In UPVX, there’s a free online course, which is actually done in EdX platform.
Who’s doing this type of course and what feedback do you get?
The standard profile is a person with low or some knowledge about electronics and robotics, but not too many. The aim of the course is to design a CAD robot model, in 3D TinkerCad (Autodesk), which is designed for kids (from 10 years old), so it is quite intuitive.
Then, you need to manufacture (laser cutting or 3d printing) the designed parts and glue all electronics and connect them. We also explain the foundamentals of Arduino and block programming with a tool named Facilino.
Quite a lot of people have contacted me, gratefully, because of the course contents, no only because is free, but also because the proposal is attractive enough to encourage them do it.
Online courses for teaches and schools.
Many teachers conectat me too and they are also greateful for providing a guided solution. For some of them, it is an opportunity to discover new technologies. They mention that many students are highly motivated with the idea of creating their own robot.
What is Facilino?
Its a tool for generating code for Arduino through blocks. Facilino, it is based on Blocky (Google) a library for block programming. It allows you to create complex codes just by drag and drop some blocks as if a puzzle. It has advance features that make programming easier and can handle a lot of electronics. We have good feedback from users, but we are still improving the tool. It is available in Windows, Mac, Linux, Android, (soon in iOS too).
Where we can buy it?
The robot materials can be found in roboticafacil.es.
Your students at UPV… what they do?
They do the same activity as I am proposing in the course. The main difference is that I asked to create an original design and chose their own electronics (if necessary). Some of them have really good ideas that inspire me too.
From your point of view, how is robotics in Spain?
We are not that bad, but obviously we are not in the top. We have a good robotic industrialization integration. In service robotics, there are some companies, but the competitors are very strong too.
Coming back to the University, what other entrepreneurship activities are you doing?
With a colleague, we are designing a product based on DYOR, we would like to create a spin-off company.
