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Oleksiy Drobnych, PhD, Java Coach, Assistant Professor at Uzhhorod National University, CTO at ELFi Robotics

Oleksiy dedicated about 10 years of his life for professional software development projects and sharing his experience with students of the Uzhhorod National University. He has created more than 20 Android and iOS apps, several web portals and runned three development teams. He is playing the role as an IT trainer in several Software Development companies in the directions of Java, Android, Ruby on Rails, Clean Code and TDD.

At Cafe Neu Romance 2015 Mark together with his dad Oleksiy will hold the presentation ELFi Robotics Education Program about how he thinks robotics and education should be like.

Problem: There is a complex gap between "school" robotics and "professional" one. A lot of FAT books about Autonomous Robots, Natural Language Understanding and Artificial Intelligence look like a huge barrier for kids and students interested in robotics.

A lot of kids are good at mechanics and controlling code, FLL and WRO contests but isolated from thriving world of real talking and thinking robots.

Solution: The solution is to provide simplified application programming interface and simple examples of Voice Recognition, Natural Language Understanding, Face and visual Object detection based on famous LEGO MINDSTORMS sets.

This simplicity is possible now because of new innovative libraries and clouds developed by numerous Startups including ELFi Robotics.

In short, we propose to add an Android robotic brain to EV3-based LEGO models so that kids can start talking to their robots. After this first step we'll show how to teach a personal robot and how to program its brain.

Result: After testing this program together with a small group of high school students we discovered an increasing interest in direction of programming, machine learning, generating ideas for new applications of thinking, talking and observing robots.

The concept of layered architecture

Layered architecture of ELFi Brain allows to clearly separate concerns over the source code. We have 3 layers:

- Brain
- Algorithms
- Controllers

Controllers have a well-known code for all EV3 LEGO enthusiasts. It has the code which controls motors, sensors, Bluetooth Mail Box and the other parts of MINDSTORMS platform.

So if you need to do some actions like raise a left hand of robot - you have to  add a code inside EV3-G program first.

Algorithms - a glue between controller programs and a robotic brain. For example "dance" command will reuse and repeat many simple and small controller codes. Otherwise we had to create tons of repeatable code for EV3-G.

This approach allows students to understand one of fundamental principles of professional software coding: DON'T REPEAT YOURSELF.

Brain part of ELFi architecture is the most interesting and intriguing one. It makes our robot behave like a human. Brain allows to create  complex reactions of robot to external world, events,  voice commands, moving faces or others object in visible area or message from another robot via special channel of communication. Robot can analyse many contexts and prehistory before acting in response to particular event. This is why we call ELFi "Intelligent" robot.

ELFi Robotics Education Program Description: This program is provided for STEM education groups, FLL teams and individuals who learn robotics using popular Lego EV3 sets. This program opens doors for professional software development, architecture and fundamental concepts of building intelligent autonomous robots for beginners, especially for those who gained some experience in simple mechanics and graphic programming of LEGO EV3 controllers.

[image source: Mark Drobnych]
[source: Vive Les Robots!]