Meet the Maker – RoboSlam

RoboSlam

RoboSlam is a robot-building workshop for beginners, which we have been running in a variety of settings for the last two or three years. Our workshops are staffed entirely by volunteers, mostly staff and students from the Dublin Institute of Technology, and our aim is to introduce people to programming, electronics and robotics by guiding them through the construction and programming of an autonomous robot in just a few hours. Getting started in robotics can be costly, so one of the most important principles of RoboSlam is to keep our robot recipe ultra low-cost. Our target cost is €10 per robot for materials. This means that many participants get to take part in our workshops (and take home a working programmable robot) either for very low cost or even free of charge whenever a sponsor agrees to cover the cost of the materials.

This is our second year at Dublin Maker. We had an unforgettable experience last year, meeting all the other makers and the crowds of visitors who were interested in seeing our robots. Because our normal RoboSlam workshop lasts several hours, we couldn’t do that at Dublin Maker where large numbers of visitors would be coming and going, so instead we focused on exhibiting some of our robots are telling people about our project. However, to make things more interactive this year we’ve designed a very stripped back version of the robot which we hope will take under an hour to construct, so we’re hoping to get a few dozen passers-by to sit down and build a robot. We’re calling it RoboSlam Cafe – if there’s a table free, why not drop in and order a robot kit from one of our servers? You’ll need to bring your own coffee though!