Twenty high school students gathered in huddles across a classroom, each hunched over a computer or fiddling with a small tri-legged robot. In one corner, students attempted to make the robot walk forward, laughing as it fell down after the first few steps.
The students were eagerly preparing for the Feiyue Robotics Program showcase, held at the Carnegie Mellon Robotics Institute on August 2, 2024.
The Feiyue Robotics Program officially started back in 2013, led by Girls of Steel Robotics and assisted by research professor George Kantor. The program was originally a FIRST Robotics Competition robot-building bootcamp where students built a robot in two weeks and took their creations to local offseason events such as WVROX or Steel City Showdown.
In the midst of the Covid-19 pandemic, the summer program paused, but reignited in 2024 with renewed interest from the students and faculty. This year assistant professor Zeynep Temel led the program alongside Ph.D. students Sarvesh Patil and Yizhou Chen.
The renewed two-week program began on July 22, with CMU hosting eighteen high school students from China and two from Thailand. The program started with a week-long course on Artificial Intelligence. The second week dedicated ample time to real, hands-on work with a robot, mechanical design, and programming small mobile robots pre-built by Sarvesh Patil.
For the final day, the students programmed and prepared their robots to accomplish five tasks. The tasks included having the robot walk in a straight line, make a right turn, a left turn, rotate in place, and see which team could have their robot walk the fastest. Each task required the students to put the skills and knowledge they gained in the program to the test.
The students all received a certificate of completion for successfully meeting the requirements of the program. They now enter the new school year with highly sought-after skills in programming autonomous robots.
For More Information: Aaron Aupperlee | 412-268-9068 | aaupperlee@cmu.edu