In honor of national robotics week, we are looking at work coders are doing to make the field more accessible and approachable. Skidmore graduate Nathan Wissner recently completed one such project. His goal was to create a platform where young people could prototype and test robotics code without the hardware expense of buying an actual robot. Nathan came to this idea when he was studying robotics in his final semester.

“I was very upset that I had to pay $400 for a robotics kit just to learn the basics. It demonstrated a clear barrier to entry for lower-income learners.”

With this in mind, he set out to create a web-based platform to run robotics code.

“Writing code is free. I just wanted a way to remove all of the outside costs that robotics requires.”

 The final product is a web-based platform that will take in a code file and display the actions of the robot live via webcam.  The project could spark learning and interest in a population that was otherwise shut out of the robotics field. Web-based platforms are a trend happening with robotics that goes well beyond this one project. Many “nodeBot” developers are working to create tools for interfacing Javascript code with robotics. The has mostly been in an effort to simplify the process of creating "internet of things*" devices. The proliferation of these resources makes Nathan’s project that much more valuable. The appeal and “cool factor” of robotics can be used as an engine to familiarize learners with a skillset in demand for a growing area of the economy. Nathan has also expressed interest in expanding the resources as they pertain to his application.

“I want to create libraries that control different robot configurations and leave the code accessible for users.”

These libraries will give learners tools to use and a sense of the lower level code required to operate different robotics configurations. With the idea in place and a number of successful tests of the application from across the country, Nathan is now looking towards the future of his app, attempting to increase the mobile-friendliness of the application and find venues to host different robots for its eventual rollout. Though plenty of work remains ahead, ideas like this are eliminating the barriers to entry for robotics and making valuable knowledge available to the masses.

*From Wikipedia: “The Internet of things (IoT) is the extension of Internet connectivity into physical devices and everyday objects.”

Photo and Video provided by Nathan Wissner with his permission.