Teach Me: an Interactive Robot Learning Experience at the Edinburgh Science Festival

Edinburgh, UK – 8-9th April 2026

Photo: Members of the Centre for AI in Assistive Autonomy in Dynamic Earth during the Edinburgh Science Festival 2026 

Engaging the Public

As robots have the potential to be collaborators in our activities of daily living, it’s important to bring them out of the confined lab space and into the broader public to demystify fears, misconceptions, and myths surrounding the technology and to showcase the benefits robots can provide. In this pursuit, the Centre for AI in Assistive Autonomy coordinated an activity together with volunteers at the School of Informatics as part of the Edinburgh Science Festival 2026: Going Global. Together with other researchers at the University of Edinburgh, we participated in the showcase at Dynamic Earth, which was visited by hundreds of pupils and their parents throughout the week.

Generations of Robots come together

In our activity, we aimed to familiarise the participants with robotics and its naturally multifaceted nature, where perspectives from engineering and informatics meet. The two robotic platforms, Baxter and XLeRobot, were demonstrated. Baxter is a human-like two-armed collaborative industrial robot designed by Rethink Robotics in 2012. In the School of Informatics, it has been used for a variety of human-robot interaction experiments, including human-robot co-work and assistance, and it provides strong support for classical robotics pipelines. XLeRobot is an open-source robotic platform launched in 2025, built on top of the LeRobot robot learning framework. It is designed for ease of use, prototyping, and deep learning in robotics. Together, these two robots provided a spectrum of possible interactions for the participants, including the ability to teleoperate them and to observe them act autonomously to complete simple manipulation tasks.

Photo: XLeRobot demonstration