SOCIETY

In the 1st Open Call Robotics and Entrepreneurship Competition, a total of 5 school teams and 5 university teams were selected, after a year of preparation and implementation of ideas, to reach the final. Throughout the competition, the teams participated in online educational seminars and 1-1 mentoring sessions by distinguished speakers, the World Robotics Champion Diana Voutirakou and Plaisiobots. Two school teams, "N'visioN" and "Glaũx" and one university team, "Engibeers", won 1st place and managed to win the trip and a unique opportunity to meet the renowned Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and Boston's technology companies. Particularly, members of the “N'visioN” school team, inspired by a presentation they attended on cardiopulmonary resuscitation at their school, created a robotic simulator of the human body, which is called “Anestis”, and a model of a defibrillator. Their goal was to properly educate students about CPR and defibrillation without the presence of an instructor. Using sensors, the trainee's technique is tested and real-time data are sent to the trainee via Bluetooth and audio messages.   The members of the school team “Glaũx”, inspired by Nefeli, who suffers from severely reduced distance visual acuity (albinism), built a device that allows the student to read better the information marked on the teaching board, in order to better participate in the educational environment. It uses computer vision and machine learning techniques to convert the content of the whiteboard into an image, which is projected onto an eye visor that is attached to the glasses.Members of the university team “Engibeers” created a support system for visually impaired people through audio instructions. Airis, as they call it from the terms Artificial Intelligence and Iris, analyses the user's 'visual' field and provides audio information, answering each question. The device consists of a custom-made 3D printed pair of glasses with a built-in camera, a micro-computer (Raspberry Pi) and a pair of Bluetooth headphones to communicate with the user.

In the 2nd Open Call Robotics and Entrepreneurship Competition "Plaisiobots: The Race 2.0", participants took part in the theoretical programming tutorials held online with Diana Voutirakou, the world champion in robotics, answering exercises and tests. Based on their evaluation and scoring, 200+ students advanced to the next phase of the competition. On the practical side, 58 teams from February 2023 trained in person and prepared their projects with the help of the partner robotics centres, making their ideas real, in order to answer the competition theme "How robots improve human life". The “Robohandy” team from Agrinio, having as an idea a life-size prosthetic robotic hand, which is operated by its user with voice commands, managed to emerge as the winner of the final and travel to Switzerland to live a unique experience, having access to the largest European Laboratory of Nuclear Energy and Particle Physics "CERN". Prizes were also awarded to the next two teams. Τhe “FA Project” team from Patras, created a system to control the provision of aid to each farmer and cultivator, with the aim of reducing waste and making better use of available resources, and took the second place winning a gift voucher of 1000 euros. In the third place with the eye muscle training system for people with strabismus was the “Trainer Eyes” team from Serres, which also won a 1000-euro gift voucher.

This initiative constitutes a modern learning environment that is predominantly characterized by teamwork, interaction, creativity and collaboration and provides stimuli for young people to engage with new technologies.