Students to Demonstrate Sophisticated Robots at NASA
Thirty Bay Area high school students will demonstrate the amazing capabilities of their newly constructed robots on Friday, Aug. 16, capping a seven-week summer robotics camp held at NASA.
The demonstration will begin at 11:00 a.m. PDT and continue until 4:00 p.m. PDT in the lobby and in front of Carnegie Mellon West, located in Bldg. 17 at NASA Research Park. The robots were constructed during this summerís July 1 to Aug. 16 robotics camp offered by Carnegie Mellon University at its west coast campus. The camp was held in collaboration with NASA Ames Research Center, located in Californiaís Silicon Valley, and the National Hispanic University, San Jose, Calif.
Students in the ëRobotic Autonomyí program built, programmed and operated their personal vision-based, mobile robots as they learned about the electronics, mechanics and computer science of robotic systems. The Robotic Autonomy course was taught by Illah Nourbakhsh, assistant professor of robotics at Carnegie Mellonís Robotics Institute in Pittsburgh. Nourbakhsh is co-founder of the instituteís Toy Robots Initiative and conducts research in electric wheelchair sensing devices, robot learning, theoretical robot architecture, believable robot personality, visual navigation and robot locomotion. Nineteen of the robotics campís class of 30 students are Latino high school juniors and seniors from the San Jose area, including the new Latino College Preparatory Academy located on the National Hispanic University campus.
The Robotic Autonomy course represents Carnegie Mellonís first outreach program on its west coast campus at the NASA Research Park. Courses leading to masterís degrees in software engineering and e-business will begin in the fall. The west coast campus is a branch of Carnegie Mellon University, which is located in Pittsburgh, and known as one of the worldís premier institutions for information technology research and education.
For more information about robotic autonomy, see:
www.cs.cmu.edu/~rasc
For more information about Carnegie Mellon West, see:
http://west.cs.cmu.edu
For more information about the National Hispanic University, see:
www.nhu.edu
