Baby Steps Towards Community Robotics

Google Tech Talks
July 27, 2007

ABSTRACT

The CREATE lab and the Global Connection Project have embarked on a series of public projects to try and understand how significant scaling may be feasible using robotics for technology empowerment and community-building. Our work is now hybridizing the Global Connection efforts together with our more traditional Telepresence Robot Kit and CMUcam educational tools, and we are carrying out experiments locally in Pittsburgh and internationally in collaboration with UNESCO. I will describe the current status of our community products, describing both our target communities spanning the cognitive pipeline, and the new technologies we are releasing this year (CMUcam3, a fully programmable, public-domain embedded computer vision system; TeRK, a single-box solution for complete I/O control of robots together with a Linux OS and connectivity to the iRobot Create and other robots; Canary, a new embedded environmental sensor and kinetic art controller; and Gigapan, a multi-billion pixel panoramic image capture, display and annotation system. I will end by describing the beginning of our unified effort at large-scale public, activist robotic art across Pittsburgh, called Robot 250, which is funded by a group of five corporations and foundations.
Illah R. Nourbakhsh is an Associate Professor of Robotics and head of the Robotics Masters Program in The Robotics Institute at Carnegie Mellon University. He is co-founder of the Toy Robots Initiative at The Robotics Institute, director of the Center for Innovative Robotics and director of the Community Robotics, Education and Technology Empowerment (CREATE) lab. He is also co-PI of the Robot 250 city-wide art+robotics fusion program in Pittsburgh. His current research projects include educational and social robotics and community robotics. His past research has included protein structure prediction under the GENOME project, software reuse, interleaving planning and execution and planning and scheduling algorithms, as well as mobile robot navigation. Illah recently co-authored the MIT Press textbook, Introduction to Autonomous Mobile Robots.

Google engEDU
Speaker: Illah Nourbakhsh