Making a more accessible and diverse robotics field

This article originally appeared in the December'24 magazine issue of Electronic Specifier Design – see ES's Magazine Archives for more featured publications.

Ewing specialised in multi-robot systems during his PhD, focusing on improving the control and coordination of drone swarms. During this research, he developed systems for managing drone swarms to perform specific tasks.

Vicon provided Ewing and his team with ultra-wideband instruments and ‘lighthouse stations,’ capable of triangulation in combination with the high-accuracy sensors onboard the drones. Ewing compared these lighthouse stations to the base stations used with the HTC Vive. By integrating these technologies, Ewing and his team have been able to track the drones in real time with a high degree of accuracy.

Improving accessibility

Whilst the motion capture technology has been fantastic in advancing drone swarm controls and coordination, a significant additional benefit also emerged – accessibility to robotics.

Ewing, given the context of working within a university, found that the motion capture approach makes the learning curve and setup time of robots significantly lower than traditional approaches. “Utilising our system with the Vicon approach, it essentially makes robots just… work,” says Ewing. The initial set up is almost ready to go straight out of the package, there isn’t a need for a large amount of coding or tricky prompts. “It works very well on its own which means we have been able to run outreach programmes,” he continues. Thanks to its relative simplicity, the code required to run an operation robot/drone is around ’20 lines,’ which allows the drone to respond to wand pointer commands and more. “It makes all sorts of activities very simple and straightforward, which is great for getting more people involved in robotics and computer science,” Ewing enthused.

Bringing inclusivity to STEM and robotics

Owing to the improved accessibility and outreach of this new approach, Ewing has been able to experiment with different crossover groups that would otherwise never be exposed to the world of STEM. One such group was with the art department at Brown University. “The art world is almost at the other end of the spectrum when it comes to something like computer science, so it’s great to have different people exposed to the subject.

“Traditionally art is a subject that has a much higher female-to-male ratio, whereas STEM subjects are the opposite, so it’s great to get a more diverse group involved with the STEM subject area.”

STEM Women found that in the UK, despite there being a slight uptick of 3% of women in STEM subjects in recent years, the statistics still aren’t ideal. Women account for only 31% of enrolments in core STEM fields overall, but just 23% of all those in engineering a technology specifically. Despite steady improvements, significant gender imbalances persist, particularly in fields like computer science and engineering. This is why programmes such as Ewing’s are vital to the industry.

Getting the next generation involved

Another big success has been the ability to get more young people involved within robotics and computing in a fun and interactive way.

It was only recently that Ewing and his team welcomed young children into their lab for an activity day where they got hands-on experience with drones and robots in a safe environment. “During these outreach events we can track all sorts of different things to create fun activities for the younger audiences. Recently we had some kids come in that got to control small drones called ‘crazy flies’ using a little wand that the drones will follow.” This is all achievable quickly and made much simpler using motion capture technologies.

Ewing hopes that these sort of activities can become more prominent for outreach and within education, especially if the cost becomes more affordable. “Really it comes down to cost at the end of the day. We’re a big university with a research budget, so we are able to utilise this technology, but this isn’t the sort of thing you will be seeing at a school just yet.” Nevertheless, Ewing remains optimistic about the future of the technology in this regard, maybe in the near future we will have a whole generation of drone and robotics-crazed children eyeing up the next big invention!