First of all I would be remiss if I did not thank the Open-Source Hardware Association and the Sloan Foundation for selecting me to be an Open-Source Hardware Trailblazer Fellow. The year went by so quickly and I cannot belive I’m one month from the end. I never imagined that the work that I naturally do to normalize and amplify seeing Black people doing STEM in order to diversify the profession would grant me such an awesome opportunity. Robotics For the Streets is all about increasing visibility of and access to STEM for minoritized, marginalized and under resourced communities.
I also need to thank all of the great support from Alicia Gibb, Lecia Ductan, Lee Wilkins and the other trailblazer fellows. Also my students: Alex, Katie, Josiah, and Sean and the Rose-Hulman ECE staff: Gary, Mark, Jack, and Ashley.
When I started this journey, I just wanted to design and build my robots and share them with professional community and social media STEM enthusiasts. Then when I needed evaluators my goal was simply to find ten people to give me feedback on the utility of the platform for academics to engage in service, teaching and research. Therefore, imagine my surprise when I had 44 requests for robots and shipped some as far away as Kenya, Turkey, and Colombia.
Although, I was not able to meet all of my initial goals, I am still very proud of what I was able to accomplishment. One of my proudest moments was presenting the results of my work as the keynote speaker at the Open Hardware Summit at NYU Law In Manhattan, NY on Friday, 4/28/23. I met some of the most awesome people and participated in some great workshops, demos and networking sessions.
I will say that although the grant ends on 5/31/23, this is only the beginning. My work will continue, the spark has been lit for open-source robotics and it will not stop. Here is just a sample of the things to come:
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- Present paper on Flower∞Bots at Frontiers In Education Conference
- Publish article about Flower∞Bots in IEEE Transactions on Education Journal
- Document, document and document the entry points for the Flower∞Bots including assembly, programming and basic movement and sensing and control. Refine the design for Rosie∞Bot and present some use cases.
- Create more curriculum and activities for Flower∞Bots (YouTube, HacksterIO, Instructables, GitHub)
- Support several faculty planning to use robots for research, class, and summer programs
- Launch KickStarter to garner support for Flower∞Bots
- Sell robots on DFRobot.com
- Collaborate with Arduino and Viam Robotics on robotics education projects
Thank you for sharing with me on this journey. 🙏🏾👩🏾🏫👩🏾🎓👷🏾♀️👩🏾💻