Secondary school students meet the Swiss Space Center
© 2015 EPFL
Enthusiastic robot-developing students from OS Progymatte Thun visited the Swiss Space Center to learn more about robots for space and get an insight into research and atmosphere at EPFL.
The Swiss Space Center welcomed 25 participants of the 2015 first Lego League Trash Trek Challenge, in which Lego Mindstorms robots are programmed by teams of students. Among other tasks, trash has to be sorted and disposed correctly. In addition, the teams have to elaborate the concept of a robot to solve a trash-related problem. One of the teams has selected space debris as a topic for their robot, so the Swiss Space Center invited them together with their teacher to learn more about the matter. In a race against time they experienced how difficult it is to capture a non-cooperative target, as they had to capture a model of the SwissCube satellite with a quadcopter. In the afternoon students visited the Laboratory of Intelligent Systems, whose research benefits from the interplay of robotics and biology: impressive examples are the Daler robot, which can turn its legs into wings, and the RoboGen project, a versatile building-block robot that you can 3D-print yourself. Later on they have been welcomed by the Science Outreach Department, who offered them a premiere on how to build a solar cell whose functioning mimics photosynthesis.
All in all, it has been a stimulating day for everyone involved. We hope the OS Progymatte Thun students will come back to visit us in February 2016, when the FLL Semifinals will take place at EFPL.
For more information, please refer to the following resources:
http://www.first-lego-league.org
http://swisscube.epfl.ch/
http://lis.epfl.ch/DALER
http://robogen.org/
https://vimeo.com/134452429
http://sps.epfl.ch/