Tribotix were introduced to Kaimax by Professor Kim Jong-Hwan at the ICARA 2004 conference in New Zealand. Professor Kim Jong-Hwan believed that the KAI Robot System would be ideally suited to Primary and Secondary Educational Institution in Australia and New Zealand.

After reviewing the KAI Robot system Tribotix pursued the distributorship of this system. We at Tribotix believe the KAI Robot has many features which make it attractive to the educational market, these being:

Mechanical
The mechanical based construction set allows for incredible flexibility in robotic design. The shaft, gear and pulleys combined with a wheeled or tracked drive system allows for very intricate mechanical design. Also, the fact that conventional servo motors can be connected directly to the control module increase the mechanical possibilities for any robotic design.

Electronics
The beauty of the KAI Robots electronics is its simplicity. The KAI Robot Control(KRC) module is based around a popular RISC based 8-bit mcu. The electronic sensors and actuators are interfaced to this mcu by conventional electronic connectors. This gives the student the flexibility to use the sensors and actuators provided with the KRC or design their own. The fact that the electronics are ‘exposed’ and the interconnecting wires ‘visible’ allows students to better understand the principles behind electronic circuitry.

Software
The KRC module comes with a GUI that allows students to develop their software using a conventional flowchart based design. This flowchart is then converted to C, complied and downloaded as an executable to the KRC module. The fact that the student can see their flowchart in C before it is complied will aid their future learning of the structure and syntax of C code. Students can also program the KRC module directly in C, this added feature allows students from Primary and Secondary schools to use the KAI Robot system. Another major advantage of the software is the flexible licensing, the GUI software may be installed on multiple PC’s with the only condition being that the software only be used to program the KRC modules.

The combination of the mechanical, electronic and software features means that the KAI Robot system is an ideal tool for educational purposes. We at Tribotix would recommend any educational institutions initiating or improving a robotic program to consider using the KAI Robot system. When it comes down to the crunch, we wouldn’t be selling it if we didn’t believe it to be a useful educational tool.