Robots for education
Ana-Maria Stancu is the CEO of Bucharest Robots, the first start-up company in Romania dedicated to humanoid robots and service robots, and the founder of RoboHub, a learning centre in the field of robotics and programming, especially dedicated to children from vulnerable groups, but also open to other children as well as adults.
Ana-Maria Cononovici, 06.01.2026, 14:00
Ana-Maria Stancu is the CEO of Bucharest Robots, the first start-up company in Romania dedicated to humanoid robots and service robots, and the founder of RoboHub, a learning centre in the field of robotics and programming, especially dedicated to children from vulnerable groups, but also open to other children as well as adults. She is also a member of the board of euRobotics, the European civil robotics network and has over 20 years of experience in the field of NGOs and monitoring public policies in Romania. She initiated, together with other organisations in the field, the Coalition for Digital Education in Romania and is actively involved in the development of public policies in the field of new technologies. In an interview to Radio Romania, Ana-Maria Stancu answered a series of topical questions such as: are robots a solution on the labor market? Are there any dangers? What is the development of this sector today and what is expected in the future?
But let’s first hear her talk about how she embarked on this road:
“I think it was in 2018 when I attended the European Robotics Forum hosted that year by Amsterdam that it felt like we were living in the Middle Ages in Romania in this respect. This was followed by an initiative by euRobotics, this European Robotics Network, namely the European Robotics Week. And I liked this idea and I remember that at that time I asked a friend who had a company to buy me two robots and I asked Elisabeta Moraru, from Google, to give me two VR glasses, made of cardboard, which are very affordable and I also had a 360-degree VR camera and I put them all in a suitcase and from that week on I started going to a few schools and showing the children. My idea was that if the children from Bucharest don’t get a chance to see something like this and aren’t used to it, then what are the chances for children from other cities or from countryside to have access to these technologies? Today, some years later, things have changed quite a lot. There are a number of local initiatives, in almost all counties and there are at least two or three robotics teams participating in the First Tech Challenge Championship.”
The challenge rights now seems to be training teachers using the new technologies, because, unfortunately, there is a great inertia in the Romanian school system, and despite the fast pace of new discoveries, the high school curriculum, for example, has not been changed for the last 11 years. We learned from our interlocutor that her robots are an integral part of the team and help train students and teachers alike:
“I have about five humanoid robots in my office, a disinfection robot and many, many other smaller educational robots. […] Each one has its own personality: there’s Escu, the eldest, then there’s Amelia, and another one who carries the trays and is called Monica.”
Ana-Maria Stancu says that human jobs are still safe. She explains:
“The CEO, the head of NVIDIA, the company that manufactures the parts that make artificial intelligence move, said that first of all we should learn physics and mathematics, because they are very tangible things in the real world, and then he said that trades will be the future, no matter how advanced robots are now. You’ve probably seen videos on the internet that show us robots doing everything; take them with a grain of salt, because it’s not exactly what we see on the internet. What we see on the internet is the robot moving in a controlled environment. This means that that robot was trained in that space, it made that movement a thousand times until it got it right and then it was filmed and posted on the internet.”
Because the digital environment is full of videos telling us that robots are coming and that they will start thinking for us and replacing us, Ana-Maria Stancu explained:
“ChatGPT, we give it as an example because everyone uses it, as well as other types of generative AI, works in the same way. They are called generative AI because they generate. The people at ChatGPT have created a very large database of documents, with millions of documents, and this algorithm goes through them and does some kind of statistics. It basically tells us that if the word ‘radio’ appears, the most frequent word next to the word ‘radio’ is ‘guest’. And next to the word ‘guest’, the most likely and most frequently used word is ‘woman’. When we ask it: ‘tell me something about a radio show’, it will say ‘a woman is invited on the radio’. Why? Because it calculates probabilities.”
In Romania, there is an organisation called the Coalition for Digital Education, which is actively involved in the development of public policies in the field of new technologies. Thus, training has been provided for employees of state institutions in the field of communication with citizens, guidelines on how public authorities should communicate with the public, and other initiatives that are slowly but surely changing the pace of digital transformation in Romania.
