Students’ Panel: Design Thinking- Based Robot Challenge towards Innovative Systems and Services
Facilitator: Prof. Dr. Harumi Watanabe (Tokai University)
Yudai Asai (Shinshu University)
Keita Hagiwara (Shibaura Institute of Technology)
Naoya Kumagai (Shibaura Institute of Technology)
Yudai Yamada (Tokai University)
This session aims to introduce Robot Challenge and discuss its education with students who joined the Japanese robot challenge this summer.
APRIS Robot Challenge has been held as a featured special event within APRIS 2022 since 2018. Also, its organizing members have continued the Japanese version of the robot challenge called “ESS (MDD) Robot challenge†,” supported by IPSJ, since 2004. Furthermore, from 2010 to 2020, both robot challenges were supported by an educational project called enPiT of the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science, and Technology.
The challenge aims to provide a state of art education involving IoT developments. Until previous years, we provide education: Model Driven Development, Real-Time programming (including ROS), project management (Scrum), and basic control theory. The education is based on an educational framework QuadPro that is provided by enPiT-Emb for educating embedded systems within enPiT. This framework consists of the following: <Product> technical abilities to design an embedded product; <Process> managerial abilities to deploy development processes; <Project> abilities to work collaboratively on a project; and <Professionalism> ethics as an embedded engineer.
This year, the robot challenge will additionally try Design Thinking. Recently, we have often heard the word “digital destruction” and received benefits from innovative services and technologies. For such innovation, design thinking is a well-known tool as a silver bullet because design thinking aims to solve wicked problems that are sources of innovation.
The panelists of this session joined the new robot challenge involving Design Thinking, and their group developed amazing drone systems. Those systems were clearly different from previous robot challenges and ordinal workshops without Design Thinking. In this session, students introduce the development experience and discuss how to progress what they learned in the workshop to the future.