Biography
Biography: Boian Mitov
Abstract
Statement of the Problem: Robotics is becoming increasingly important part of the STEM education. With the increased availability of cheap Arduino controllers, Sensor Modules, actuators and entire robot KITs, the students are able quickly to learn how to build robots, and connect the electronic components. Most students however struggle with programming the micro-controllers due to the complexity of the available programming tools and the tools general unsuitability for easily processing simultaneous tasks. Software development is considerably different than designing and connecting hardware, requiring a complete paradigm shift in understanding of how everything works.
A new approach to programming robots in STEM classes: To solve this problem, a new graphical data-flow, and event driven programming approach to micro-controller, and robot programming has been developed, and an easy to use graphical development environment called Visuino https://www.visuino.com has been introduced. The data-flow, and event driven approach makes programming very similar to the way kids connect sensor modules and actuators to the micro-controller. In Visuino the typical hardware modules such Servos, Stepper Motors, are represented by corresponding software graphical representations, making it easy to understand how the hardware will be controlled.
Once the graphical design is completed, by pressing a button, Visuino generates ready to compile and upload C++ code, making it very quick, and easy to create complex Robot projects in very short time