Colias: towards an affordable mobile robot for education in developing countries

Educational robotics can play a key role in addressing some of the important challenges faced by higher educationin developing countries. One of the major obstacles preventing a wider adoption of initiatives involving educational robotics in these parts of the world is a lack of robot platforms which would be affordable for the local educational institutions. In this paper, we present our inexpensive mobile robot platform Colias and assess its potential for education in developing countries. To this end, we describe hardware and software components of the robot, assess its suitability for education and discuss the missing features which will need to be developed to turn Colias into a fully featured educational platform. The presented robot is one of the key components of our current efforts in popularisingeducational robotics at African universities.