Arquitectura para Utilizar Robots AIBO en la Enseñanza de la Inteligencia Artificial

Student motivation and involvement are two key factors to achieve educational objectives. For this reason, it is essential that students are made aware of the possible practical applications of the theoretical contents being taught. To this end, we have adapted the laboratory sessions of the Artificial Intelligence module so that students can bring into practice the concepts learned. By using AIBO robots we have designed teaching materials based on active learning, achieving a greater motivation and a significant improvement of student’s academic performance. This has been done by re-designing three of the laboratory sessions so that students make use of the robots. To avoid the time required to learn the proprietary programming environment, we have implemented a series of interfaces to ease the interaction with the robot and allow the use of any programming language. In this article we present the hardware and software architecture used to fulfill this objective and we describe the three laboratory session in which this is used.