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Strategic Partnership to Bring the Cutting-edge Robotics Technology to Latin American Academics Community

Educational leaders ALDEBARAN Robotics and ISTEC launched a collaboration to advance student learning using humanoid robotics in Latin American science and technology classes.

 

(California) ALDEBARAN ROBOTICS, the leader of humanoid robotics and academic partner of the most prestigious universities, schools and laboratories worldwide, along with ISTEC, the Ibero-American Science and Technology Education Consortium, announced a premier partnership to create awareness of humanoid robotics in Latin American education and bring the most advanced technology to ISTEC members with NAO humanoid robot.

 

As advocates to empower educators, both parties have agreed to create a special ‘Center of Excellence’ Certification Program for all ISTEC members around NAO, ALDEBARAN Robotics’ humanoid robot. This program will provide special training to professors interested in using NAO within their daily curriculum that will meet Science and Technology Standards of Latin America. Universities will have the option of purchasing NAOs at a discounted price, combined with training and certification options for their teaching and research staff.

 

NAO has been adopted as the new standard of technology education by more than 500 universities and high schools in the US, Europe, and Asia. Through organizations such as ISTEC, Latin America is now moving towards the same direction of improving education starting in countries such as Brazil, Mexico, Columbia, Argentina, and Peru.

 

NAO is an interactive and fully programmable, 23 inch-tall humanoid robot, with 25 degrees of freedom. NAO comes with a sensor network that includes two cameras, four microphones, nine tactile sensors, sonars and pressure sensors, as well as a voice synthesizer and two high-fidelity speakers. The robotic platform also comes equipped a complete software development kit with an easy to use interface that is cross-platform –Windows, Linux or Mac – and multi-language – C++, Python, JAVA, .NET, and MATLAB.

 

ALDEBARAN Robotics intends to reinforce its presence in Latin America with ISTEC to promote advanced technology in education. “It is very important for us to be able to provide the best service possible to our community. Thanks to our alliance with ISTEC, we want to help the academics community to integrate the cutting-edge technology in their research project and curriculum. We already have a lot of universities that want to be involved in this project. Also we’ll soon begin to develop, with ISTEC, a state-of-the-art NAO contest in the region. We are all very excited!” says Cedric Vaudel, Academic Regional Manager of ALDEBARAN ROBOTICS.

 

ISTEC has been committed to technology transfer and capacity building in Latin America for the last two decades. Dulce García, ISTEC President sees this alliance as a key element of the Consortium’s R&D strategic plan: “We see this partnership with Aldebaran Robotics as a way to bring our consortium of regional universities into a global community of research and curriculum best practices. An important tool in curriculum innovation is the capacity to provide students with experiential, hands-on projects by creating state-of-the art student contest opportunities in cutting edge technologies”.

 

Program offerings include:

Special price of NAO H25

Co-certification training provided by ISTEC & ALDEBARAN Robotics

Professional Certificate of Completion of Humanoid Robots in Education

Lesson plans specifically designed to meet Science & Technology Standards of Latin America

Local support of NAO provided by ISTEC

Access to NAO online community of forums and portals to share educational ideas

Support of transport logistics of NAO

Participation in a NAO Sr. Design Student Contest for Latin America in 2014

 

ISTEC (Ibero-American Science and Technology Education Consortium) is a non-profit organization dedicated to sustainable economic development in Iberoamerica, through a network of members that promote relationships of trust and integrity among academia, governments, and industry. ISTEC is also committed to strengthening social responsibility as a shared value among members in the Region.

 

Founded in 2005 by Bruno Maisonnier and now established in France, the US and China, Aldebaran Robotics designs, produces and sells humanoid robots in order to contribute to the betterment of humankind. There are currently over 3,500 NAO robots operating in schools and universities in over 70 countries worldwide for education and research. ALDEBARAN ROBOTICS has a team of 300 people, 40% of whom are engineers and doctors, involved in developing and producing its robots.