Knowledge never goes waste. When you’re interested in something, you w — Ayorkor Korsah

"The goal of AFRON is to create a community, promote communication among those interested in this field, have them share information and resources, support each other’s work and kind of bring it to a head and create a critical mass where even more interesting things can start to happen. Talking about this, you realize that it is surprising that there is something going on in robotics in schools, universities and maybe even in industry [in Africa]. It’s surprising. It’s surprising to those of us in Africa and it’s surprising to people outside of Africa."

"I’d like to see a variety of different platforms that can be used for educational robotics. Not just the Lego Mindstorms. I’d love to see some kits that are locally developed, which we don’t see much of now. In general, I’d like to see much more of it – more people involved in robotics at more levels. I think the robotics kits that exist are pretty interesting and pretty useful for students to learn from. It would just be nice to see more of that accessible to students while working on different things."

"For example, the issue of sensing, which is really important in robotics. There are so many problems in our context that could be solved using a little more sensing than we have right now: Sensing air quality or sensing the spread of insects and mosquitoes for malaria. That’s what I like to stress to my students. Think about robotics as a whole, but think about the different aspects of it and think which of these aspects are relevant to the problem that you’re trying to address. The cool thing about robotics is that it brings together all these different areas."

"The thing about robotics is that it involves many different fields. From an educational point of view, you learn about this whole idea of system integration, and you also learn a little bit about different fields. You might have a problem for which you don’t necessarily want to develop an automated robot to solve that problem, but some components of robotics might be helpful."

"It would be great to see more African countries doing more manufacturing and exporting more advanced things than just minerals and agricultural products. And robotics plays a role in manufacturing. It’s an interesting balance between what do you do with human power versus what do you do with automation. In parts of the world where labor is pretty cheap, it’s going to take some creative thinking to get that balance right. I’m not one to advocate for throwing technology at a problem if it’s not needed."

"We have about 300 individuals and institutions signed up and it’s kind of interesting because we have a real range, ranging from people like robotics researchers at universities, all to way to students who may have taken one robotics course in college and are doing completely different things now, but are definitely interested in robotics. It’s a way of bringing together anyone with any interest in robotics in Africa."