Illah Nourbakhsh
CMU
NSH 3305
Refreshments 3:15 pm
Talk 3:30 pm
The Personal Rover Project is a comprehensive effort to
develop and deploy a low-cost rover platform for diverse
environments, including the home. This rover serves as an
exploration-centered, creative outlet for children as they
shape the rover's daily and weekly activities. We argue
that such a personal rover will excite and inspire users
about math, science and engineering.
Early project results span low-cost enabling technologies such
as CMUcam, prototype mechanisms capable of climbing
steps greatly exceeding wheel diameter, and educational
study results following a 30-student test course, Robotic
Autonomy, that we taught at NASA/Ames this summer.
In this talk, I will describe project activities, including
interaction design, platform research, user testing and
educational evaluation. This project is part of the
Toy Robots Initiative; see
www.cs.cmu.edu/~illah/EDUTOY.
Illah R. Nourbakhsh is an Associate Professor of Robotics in The
Robotics Institute at Carnegie Mellon University. He received his Ph.D.
in computer science from Stanford University in 1996. He is co-founder
of the Toy Robots Initiative at The Robotics Institute. His current
research projects include educational and social robotics, electric
wheelchair sensing devices, believable robot personality, visual
navigation and robot locomotion. His past research has included protein
structure prediction under the GENOME project, software reuse,
interleaving planning and execution and planning and scheduling
algorithms. At the Jet Propulsion Laboratory he was a member of the New
Millenium Rapid Prototyping Team for the design of autonomous
spacecraft. He is a founder and chief scientist of Blue Pumpkin
Software, Inc.
For appointments, please
contact Illah Nourbakhsh (illah@cs.cmu.edu)
The Robotics Institute is part of the School of Computer Science, Carnegie Mellon University.
