Event Location: Carnegie Mellon Main Campus

Abstract: The Robotics Institute will celebrate the third annual National Robotics Week on April 20 with project demonstrations, lab tours, the annual Mobot (mobile robot) races, a special lecture by Professor Howie Choset and a Robot reception.

Pre-registration is required for our National Robotics Week events. Please pre-register by clicking here by Monday April 16th.

Schedule of Events

12:00 noon – 4:00 pm: ROBOTICS PROJECT DEMOS
Location: Planetary Robotics Lab Highbay – 1st floor, Gates and Hillman Centers
Open to the public.

Demos will include:

River Exploration and Mapping with Small Micro Aerial Vehicles
These vehicles can fly without GPS and find the river through a camera.

Snake Robots

Calliope
A prototype small-scale mobile manipulation platform that roams around on a tabletop and uses its five degree-of-freedom arm to interact with the world.  In CMU’s Cognitive Robotics course, students learn to program intelligent behaviors for Calliope using the Tekkotsu software framework and C++.

Canine – Robots that play fetch!
This requires a diverse set of behaviors: interacting with the operator in order to determine the object that’s being thrown, searching for and driving to the object, picking up the object, and returning to the operator, who may have moved.

Cooperative Robotic Watercraft – Small, autonomous watercraft are an ideal approach to flood mitigation and response. Relative to other types of vehicles, watercraft are inexpensive, simple, robust and reliable. Specifically, we are developing low cost airboats that are flat-bottomed boats that use an above-water fan to propel themselves forward safely and effectively through shallow or debris-filled water. The vision is to have large numbers of very inexpensive airboats provide situational awareness and deliver critical emergency supplies to victims.

Lunar Lander
Griffin safely and precisely lands to deliver a rover and other payloads to the lunar surface. Autonomous guidance, navigation, and control enables successful soft landing without remote human guidance.

Carbon Fiber Fabrication

Zoe
Life in the Atacama Robotic field investigation will bring new scientific understanding of the Atacama as a habitat for life with distinct analogies to Mars.

Regolith Test Bed – The Shear Interface Imaging Analysis (SIIA) tool, provides visualization and analysis capability of soil shearing and flow as it is influenced by a wheel or excavation tool.
This research is developing techniques for working lunar regolith (soil) in order to support resource extraction and site preparation. We are conducting a comprehensive study of excavation and transport mechanisms and scaling the results to the lunar environment. We are innovating new mechanisms and methods for lunar operations.

12:00 noon – 4:00 pm: ROBOTICS INSTITUTE LAB TOURS
Tours will meet and depart from GHC 2109

Lab tours will include:

HERB (Home Exploring Robot Butler) makes dinner demo!
A mobile manipulation system and household robot prototype for providing physical assistance with instrumental activities of daily living (IADLs) in the home.

Visualization Laboratory – The building of an Immersive Reality Dome

Search-based Planning Laboratory – PR2 dual-arm mobile robot, Segbot and possibly Hexarotor UAV with on-board sensing/processing

Multi-Robot Laboratory – Small size soccer robots (CMDragons), and the CoBot and CreBot robots.

TANK the roboceptionist – The goal of the project is to produce a robot helpmate that is useful, exhibits social competence, and remains compelling to interact with for an extended period of time.

Ballbot – A person-sized mobile robot that has only a single spherical wheel.

12:00 noon – 2:00 pm: MOBOT RACES
Location: Walkway outside of Wean Hall
Open to the public

2:00 – 3:00 pm: ROBOTICS 101 PRESENTATION
Speaker: Howie Choset
Location: Rashid Auditorium – Gates & Hillman 4401

3:00 – 4:00 pm: THE 15th GATE: MOBOT AWARD CEREMONY and WRAP-UP
Location: Rashid Auditorium – Gates & Hillman 4401 – 3:00 pm

4:00 – 6:00 pm: 
ROBOT RECEPTION
Location: Planetary Robotics Lab Highbay – 1st floor, Gates and Hillman Centers