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Moving robotics competitions virtual:

For almost 25 years, the goal of the RoboCup has been to build soccer robots capable of winning against the FIFA World Champion of 2050. To foster the participation of the next generation of roboticists, the RoboCupJunior competition takes place in parallel and provides a similar challenge of appropriate difficulty for high school students. RoboCupJunior has three main categories: Soccer, Rescue and OnStage. For the Soccer category, participants need to design, build and program a team of autonomous robots to play soccer against an opponent team of robots. The competition is physical in nature, since it assumes physical robots playing against one another. In 2020 and 2021, the COVID-19 pandemic has made it difficult for a competition of this type to take place, due to obvious restrictions on physical gatherings. To allow for some sort of participation, and inspired by positive experience of the larger RoboCup community, the Organizing Committee of RoboCupJunior Soccer has explored porting a portion of the challenge to a simulated environment. Many of the existing environments, however, are built for higher education/research teams competitions or research, making them complex to deploy and generally unsuitable for high school students. In this paper we present the development of SoccerSim, a simulated environment for RoboCupJunior Soccer, based on the Webots open-source robotics simulator. We also discuss how the participation of students was key for its development and present a summary of the competition rules. We further describe the case study of utilizing SoccerSim first as a testbed for a Demo competition, and later as part of RoboCup Worldwide 2021. The participation of more than 60 teams from over 20 countries suggests that SoccerSim provides an affordable alternative to physical robotics platforms, while being stable enough to support a diverse userbase. The experience of using SoccerSim at RoboCupJunior Worldwide 2021 suggests that a simulated environment significantly lowers the barrier to entry, as evidenced by the participation of many teams that have not participated before. To make it easy for similar competitions to take place in the future, we made the code of SoccerSim available as open-source, as well as the associated tooling required for using it in a tournament.

Editorial

The potential of robotics for the development and wellbeing of children with disabilities as we see it

BACKGROUND: Rapid technological development has been opening new possibilities for children with disabilities. In particular, robots can enable and create new opportunities in therapy, rehabilitation, education, or leisure. OBJECTIVE: The aim of this article is to share experiences, challenges and learned lessons by the authors, all of them with experience conducting research in the field of robotics for children with disabilities, and to propose future directions for research and development. METHODS: The article is the result of several consensus meetings to establish future research priorities in this field. CONCLUSIONS: This article outlines a research agenda for the future of robotics in childcare and supports the establishment of R4C – Robots for Children, a network of experts aimed at sharing ideas, promoting innovative research, and developing good practices on the use of robots for children with disabilities. RESULTS: Robots have a huge potential to support children with disabilities: they can play the role of a play buddy, of a mediator when interacting with other children or adults, they can promote social interaction, and transfer children from the role of a spectator of the surrounding world to the role of an active participant. To fulfill their potential, robots have to be “smart”, stable and reliable, easy to use and program, and give the just-right amount of support adapted to the needs of the child. Interdisciplinary collaboration combined with user centered design is necessary to make robotic applications successful. Furthermore, real-life contexts to test and implement robotic interventions are essential to refine them according to real needs.

Attitudes towards Social Robots in Education

While social robots bring new opportunities for education, they also come with moral challenges. Therefore, there is a need for moral guidelines for the responsible implementation of these robots. When developing such guidelines, it is important to include different stakeholder perspectives. Existing (qualitative) studies regarding these perspectives however mainly focus on single stakeholders. In this exploratory study, we examine and compare the attitudes of multiple stakeholders on the use of social robots in primary education, using a novel questionnaire that covers various aspects of moral issues mentioned in earlier studies. Furthermore, we also group the stakeholders based on similarities in attitudes and examine which socio-demographic characteristics influence these attitude types. Based on the results, we identify five distinct attitude profiles and show that the probability of belonging to a specific profile is affected by such characteristics as stakeholder type, age, education and income. Our results also indicate that social robots have the potential to be implemented in education in a morally responsible way that takes into account the attitudes of various stakeholders, although there are multiple moral issues that need to be addressed first. Finally, we present seven (practical) implications for a responsible application of social robots in education following from our results. These implications provide valuable insights into how social robots should be implemented

Junior soccer simulation - providing all primary and secondary students access to educational robotics

The use of robots as educational tools provide a stimulating environment for students. Some robotics competitions focus on primary and secondary school aged children, and serve as a motivation factor for students to get involved in educational robotics activities. But, in most competitions students are required to deal with robot design, construction and programming. Although very appealing, many students cannot participate on robotics competitions because they cannot afford robotics kits and their school do not have the necessary equipment. Because of that, several students have no access to educational robotics, especially on developing countries. To minimize this problem and contribute to education equality, we present a proposal for a new league for the robotics competitions: The Junior Soccer Simulation league (JSS). In such a league, students program virtual robots in a similar way that they would program their real ones. Because there is no hardware involved, costs are very low and participants can concentrate on software development and robot's intelligence improvement. Finally, because soccer is the most popular sport in the world, we believe JSS will be a strong motivator for students to get involved with robotics. In this paper we present the simulator that was developed (ROSOS) and discuss some ideas for the adoption of a Junior Soccer Simulation competition.

RoSoS-a free and open-source robot soccer simulator for educational robotics

The use of robots as educational tools provides a stimulating environment for students. Some robotics competitions focus on primary and secondary school aged children, and serve as motivation for students to get involved in educational robotics activities. Although very appealing, many students cannot participate on robotics competitions because they cannot afford robotics kits. Hence, several students have no access to educational robotics, especially on developing countries. To minimize this problem and contribute to education equality, we have created RoSoS Robot Soccer Simulator, in which students program virtual robots in a similar way that they would program their real ones. In this chapter we explain some technical details of RoSoS and discuss the implementation of a new league for the robotics competitions: Junior Soccer Simulation league (JSS). Because soccer is the most popular sport in the world, we believe JSS will be a strong motivator for students to get involved with robotics.