The Personal Rover Project: Robotics for the Masses

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 include the CMUcam2 embedded vision board, a weight-shifting high COM prototype for climbing ledges and educational study results following a 30 student test course, Robotic Autonomy, that has now been taught for two consecutive summers at NASA/Ames and CMU West. The newest results include the pilot deployment of the Personal Exploration Rover into top science museums around the country, including the Smithsonian National Air & Space Museum and the San Francisco Exploratorium.

In this talk I will motivate the Personal Rover Project and will describe our most recent robotic technological results and educational robotics analyses.

For more information see
www.cs.cmu.edu/~personalrover/PER
and
www.cs.cmu.edu/~cmucam

Speaker Bios

Illah R. Nourbakhsh is Robotics Group Lead at NASA/Ames Research Center. He is also Associate Professor of Robotics in The Robotics Institute at Carnegie Mellon University, on leave, and Adjunct Associate Professor at the University of California Santa Cruz. Illah 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 founder and chief scientist of Blue Pumpkin Software, Inc.

Date:
Haut-parleurs:
Illah R. Nourbakhsh
Affiliation:
NASA/Ames Research Center