Adapting body and behaviour: learning and playing with a modular robotic platform

The paper illustrates the design of Iromec, a robotic platform developed to engage disabled children in exploring play scenarios and thereby in learning through play. Key features of the system are: modularity, provided both at physical and functional level; configurability, to allow the teacher to make the physical and functional rearrangement of the robot configuration, construction to modify, enrich and adapt play activities to different and evolving needs of the disabled children. Furthermore the platform offers the possibility for the teacher/therapist to design new play scenarios addressing different educational objectives. The paper shows how the adopted design enables multiple robot configurations and play scenarios, and exemplifies the use of the robot in the school context.