Nov 19, 2007 Meeting

Monday, November 19, 2007, 6:30PM Pacific
at 6:30, 15-minute business meeting, officer election, PDF of ballot here
at 6:45, speaker presentation

Carnegie Mellon University West Coast (directions https://west.cmu.edu/who_we_are/visitor)

First Steps Towards Community Robotics

Prof. Illah R. Nourbakhsh, Associate Professor of Robotics,
The Robotics Institute, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA

TeRK - Telepresence Robotics Kits
Anyone can be interested and can build robots
Gigapan - gigapixel images from conventional digital camera

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. The Global Connection Project is hosted by Carnegie Mellon West (Moffett Field, CA) and Carnegie Mellon Robotics Institute (Pittsburgh, PA).

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 was on leave for the 2004 calendar year and was at NASA/Ames Research Center serving as Robotics Group lead. 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, 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 Global Connection Project, home of the Gigapan project. 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. At the Jet Propulsion Laboratory he was a member of the New Millennium Rapid Prototyping Team for the design of autonomous spacecraft. He is a founder and chief scientist of Blue Pumpkin Software, Inc., which was acquired by Witness Systems, Inc. Illah recently co-authored the MIT Press textbook, Introduction to Autonomous Mobile Robots.