Affordable robotics toolkits for equitable and interdisciplinary education, transformable to searching nodes for disaster onsite investigations

A cross-department research team at Shibaura Institute of Technology (SIT), a Japanese leading engineering institute, has initiated an ambitious project to develop and implement multi-dimensional robotics toolkits which are effective for facilitating engineering education for all generations - from K-12 with no programming knowledge to working professionals - by combining technopreneurship for commercializing robotics learning tools with below US 100 dollar affordability enabled by rapid technological advancement and interdisciplinary engineering education methodology theming robotics as knowledge integration of various engineering aspects. Moreover, these robot tools are equipped with practical functions to be deployed for earthquake survivor search and rescue by taking advantage of swarm technologies utilizing mesh-net mutual data communication among multiple nodes. Through this project and related research activities, the project team aims to promote solutions for each country's natural disaster profile by interconnecting the above-mentioned factors, pragmatic social issues, and the global project/problem-based learning (GPBL) method, which the authors are also passionately working to develop. This article also discusses the benefit of starting interdisciplinary robot education in early age, the necessity of an entrepreneurial mind amongst teachers, and the Robotics Learning Roadmap as a whole picture of lifelong learning.