From Eurobot to outreach
I helped run iRobotique, a Belgian non-profit built by a group of engineering students and alumni around a simple premise: robotics is a great way to teach engineering to people who don’t know they like engineering yet. The association started in 2005 around participation in the Eurobot International Robotic Contest, and ran weekly evening classes on Atmel microprocessor programming and embedded Linux.
Key people behind the adventure included Laurent Pinchart and Christophe Chariot. Over the years we won several Belgian Eurobot editions and reached 7th place in the European final in 2013.
Pivoting to museums
In 2014, we took a deliberate pivot: rather than build a new robot for a new contest every year, we would reinvest the know-how into a modular exploration platform for museums. The idea was to let visitors — children especially — drive a small mobile robot through parts of the museum that would otherwise be off-limits, while a set of cameras and sensors transmitted the experience back to a screen in the main hall.
We collaborated with the Musée Royal de Mariemont and the Pôle Muséal de Mons to design and test this platform in a real museum context.
What I learned
- Running a multi-year association with a dozen volunteers taught me more about project management than any university course ever did.
- Engineering outreach works best when the robot is just weird enough to be interesting and just reliable enough to avoid breaking mid-demo.
- The hardest part of non-profit robotics is rarely the robot: it is budgeting, logistics, and keeping the motivation high when the contest is still eight months away.
Going further
- Eurobot — the contest that started it all.
- Muséul de Mons, Musée Royal de Mariemont.