Participating Labs for 2010 

Monica Anderson's Lab at the University of Alabama

K-Team Koalas

At Monica's Distributed Autonomous Systems Lab you will work on teams of sensor-enabled mobile robots that communicate to efficiently monitor or search a region of interest. Whether operating in indoor or outdoor areas, these mobile platforms can continuously redeploy their wireless network based on static environmental features and dynamic local events, providing better coverage and resource utilization for surveillance and search tasks. Of particular interest is the problem of combining multiple image and other sensor streams to improve position estimates in situations where GPS signals are unavailable. The lab uses K-team Koalas and iRobot Creates.

Carl DiSalvo's Lab at Georgia Tech 

Carl DiSalvo

Carl DiSalvo directs the Public Design Workshop at Georgia Tech, in the School of Literature, Communication and Culture. His research is concerned with how to provide access to emerging technologies and how these technologies can be used for community building, artistic expression, and activism. Summer 2010 DiSalvo will be working on series of community-centered robotics programs appropriate to REUs. These programs include: developing design and arts-based learning materials for youth and adults to explore robotics in community contexts, conducting interviews with community members to discover new roles for sensing and robotics, and developing a robotic device that responds to environmental data. This is a unique opportunity for students interested in the application of robotics to societal improvement and community engagement.  DiSalvo is interested in students from all backgrounds, including engineering and computer science, and also students from the social sciences and arts who are interested in robotics and society. If interested, please contact Dr. Carl DiSalvo.

Jeff Forbes' Lab at Duke University 

Jeffrey Forbes

iRobot Creates

Jeff's lab is developing low-cost robot architectures for use in research and education. Building on the work of a number of different groups, these extensible low-cost systems enable undergraduates to experiment with sophisticated techniques for reinforcement learning, multi-agent control, and simultaneous localization and mapping. By implementing parameterized high-level actions, users can focus their efforts on developing control algorithms. In Jeff's lab you will develop methods for robust locomotion primitives for use by reinforcement learning algorithms and localization, and techniques for mapping using multiple robots with monocular vision.

Dieter Fox’s Lab at the University of Washington

Dieter Fox

Research in Dieter's Robotics and State Estimation Lab (RSE-Lab) focuses on machine learning and probabilistic methods for robotics and human activity recognition. Students visiting the lab will learn how to apply techniques such as particle filters to different problems such as robot mapping and controlling a blimp to fly through the atrium of the CSE department. This year, we will also offer a project in learning to control autonomous slotcars.

 

Other potential projects include the application of machine learning techniques to semantic mapping and activity recognition from wearable sensors. Semantic mapping aims at answering the following questions: How can we build robots that are able to distinguish and handle the many objects located in our everyday environments? And how can we endow these robots with the ability to reason about spatial concepts such as rooms, hallways, streets, and intersections?  Human activity recognition aims at extracting information about a person's activities, such as walking, running, or riding a bus, from sensors worn by the person.

Students who want to learn more about machine learning and probabilistic reasoning should not miss the opportunity to visit the RSE-Lab.

 

Autonomous Slotcars

Ayanna Howard's Lab at Georgia Tech

Ayanna Howard

Students working in Ayanna’s HumAnS lab will investigate strategies for human interaction with teleoperated assistive robots in home environments. These robots have the potential to dramatically improve quality of life for older or disabled adults by allowing caregivers or distant family members to conveniently help an individual with activities of daily living, such as meal preparation, administering medications, or performing simple diagnostic procedures. In response to a request for help, a caregiver could remotely take control of the robot to assess the situation and physically lend assistance. Deployment of this technology could extend options for continued living at home by lowering the costs associated with providing personalized help from skilled professionals. You will help Ayanna investigate approaches for encoding task knowledge so that teleoperation can be achieved at higher levels of abstraction, which requires less effort on the part of the operator.

HumAnS Lab

Chad Jenkins' Lab at Brown University 

Chad Jenkins

Chad is developing an online robotic gaming project called “R-Play” (Kostandov et al., 2007). R-Play provides an “XboxLIVE”-style environment for playing and developing physically embodied games with robotic agents, such as the Smurvs. The aims of R-Play center around breaking down the “personal robotics”

SmURV Robots

barriers between society and robots through the following three core properties: fun to play, persistently executing (24/7/365), and transparent with respect to its internal workings. In Chad's lab you will work on addressing this core problem: How will typical users of technology program their robots? If learning from demonstration addresses this problem, robot games can provide a familiar medium for humans to train robots.

Charlie Kemp's Lab at Georgia Tech

Charlie Kemp's Healthcare Robotics Lab focuses on hands-on research with autonomous mobile manipulating robots -- robots that move around and physically interact with their surroundings.  The lab focuses predominantly on healthcare applications and offers compelling mentorship possibilities, possessing students spanning numerous disciplines: Computer Science, Electrical Engineering, Mechanical Engineering, Biomedical Engineering, and Human Physiology.

Potential projects span the robotics gamut: mechanical design (CAD), electrical design (circuits and sensors), systems engineering (physical fabrication or software systems), programming, machine learning, and human factors (user studies and evaluations).  In essence, projects are available to match broad individual skill sets and are designed to give students hands-on experience with real robots and expose them to the challenges that currently impede deployment to real healthcare settings.

 

 

Sara Kiesler's Lab at Carnegie Mellon

Sara Keisler

The People and Robots Lab at Carnegie Mellon is headed by Sara Kiesler , a behavioral scientist, and Jodi Forlizzi, a design researcher. They are working with Paul E. Rybski, from the Robotics Institute, on research into human-robot interaction for personal service obots.  In 2008 they built a robot, called Snackbot, that supports interdisciplinary research into robust autonomous delivery perations in office environments.  Robotics research that will be acilitated by the Snackbot includes multi-sensor fusion algorithms for detecting and identifying people, objects, and locations,  reasoning bout dynamic tasks and environments, and communicating with people through verbal and non-verbal mechanisms. Snackbot will also support esearch in the fields of design and Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) on sing sound, motion, and form for effective human-robot communication. Finally, research on behavioral science will be enabled on such topics as personalization and people’s relationships with interactive objects, and research on snack services drawn from behavioral economics.

Jodie & Paul with SnackBot

 

ARTSI students Jessica Jones and Alvin Barton helped design the robot during the summer of 2008. Students working in the People and Robots lab his summer will participate in the project by helping to improve and evaluate the Snackbot robot. There are lots of interesting research problems to tackle such as how to detect what people are taking from the tray, appropriate robot dialogue and sounds, how to monitor the robot's progress remotely, how to collect and analyze log data collected from the sensors, and how the robot can customize or personalize its services.

 

 

 

James McLurkin's Lab at Rice University

James McLurkin

Swarmbots

The main research goal of James McLurkin's Multi-Robot Systems Lab at Rice University is to develop distributed algorithms for multi-robot systems.  The group focuses on research using large numbers of robots, from a few dozen to almost 100.  Currently, there are three projects in James' lab: building a multi-robot manipulator, designing a system of low-cost robots for a classroom gaming curriculum, and developing configuration control algorithms based on distributed computational geometry.  Students joining James' lab can expect to work with other undergraduates and graduate students on one of these projects.

 

Illah Nourbakhsh's Lab at Carnegie Mellon

Illah Nourbakhsh

The CREATE (Community Robotics, Education and Technology Empowerment) lab is developing arts-based toolkits designed to engage K-12 students and community members in robotics. These toolkits build upon existing work by Illah and Carl DiSalvo that strives to broaden the common understanding of what robots are and how they might function in our everyday lives.

Using these toolkits middle-school students can explore and employ a variety of basic environmental sensors to monitor pollution levels and create interactive artifacts, such as the robot flower, which express and respond to these conditions. A central tenet of the outreach effort and of the toolkits is to apply robotics in the context of student and community members’ existing issues and interests, such as “telepresence”. The

Qwekbot+

Center’s Qwekbot+ kit robot has a wireless interface that provides for remote operation from any web browser right out of the box, allowing users to experiment with telepresence experiences.

This summer the CREATE lab at Carnegie Mellon University and the Public Design Workshop from Georgia Tech will be working together in Pittsburgh to present a unique forum for community-centered robotics. The CREATE lab will be hosting Robot 250, a series of city-wide public programs featuring robots made by children and adults. The focus of Robot 250 is the creative application of robotics to personal and community expression and activism. The Robot 250 summer program includes numerous museum exhibits, educational workshops and public art installations and performances.

Robot Flower

This is a unique opportunity for students interested in the application of robotics to societal improvement and community engagement. We are interested in students from all backgrounds, including engineering and computer science, and also students from the social sciences and arts who are interested in robotics and society. REU students will have the opportunity to engage in field research, documentation and event support activities throughout the summer.  If interested, please contact Dr. Illah Nourbakhsh or Dr. Carl DiSalvo.

 

 

Edwin Olson's Lab at the University of Michigan

The APRIL lab at the University of Michigan researches autonomous robotics, with particular interest in perception, mapping, and planning. Students working in Edwin's APRIL lab during 2010 are likely to work on problems relevant to the MAGIC 2010 robotics competition, which involves teams of robots autonomously exploring an urban environment, finding and "catching" bad guys, and detecting and neutralizing bombs. This contest poses a large number of interesting perception, planning, user interface, and system integration (mechanical, electrical) problems.

ARTSI students would be joining a large number of other undergraduates; the APRIL lab currently has over twenty undergraduates actively performing research.
 

C.J. Taylor's Lab at the University of Pennsylvania

Dr. Taylor is part of the GRASP Laboratory at the University of Pennsylvania a research group that focuses on problems in robotics, prception and related fields. One of the projects that we are interested in tackling this summer involves coordinating one or more iRbot Creates using information from a set of embedded smart camera systems. The idea is to create a system that could be used to  autmatically localize both the cameras and the robots to a common frame of reference. This project will build on past work that used opical signaling techniques to localize a set of smart camera modules.

Other current projects in the laboratory include investigations into telepresence technologies for robot control, multi robot mapping and visualization of fused range and image data sets. REU students would be working in a large, dynamic research laboratory setting with other graduate and undergraduate students.

Dave Touretzky's Lab at Carnegie Mellon 

Dave Touretzky & Chiara

Working in Dave's lab you will contribute to the development of the Tekkotsu robot programming framework, or help create new educational robots that use Tekkotsu. Tekkotsu is free, open source software written in C++, with GUI tools written in Java.

Potential projects include writing cool demos for the Chiara hexapod robot (see Chiara-Robot.org), helping to refine the design of the Chiara's legs and gripper, developing new robot arms based on the Tekkotsu planar hand-eye system,  or extending Tekkotsu’s repertoire of software primitives.

The Quality of Life Technology (QoLT) Center at the University of Pittsburgh & Carnegie Mellon

The Quality of Life Technology Engineering Research Center's (QoLT ERC) vision is to transform lives of people with reduced functional capabilities due to aging or disability through intelligent devices and systems. The QoLT ERC is a unique partnership between Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) and the University of Pittsburgh, integrating CMU’s strength in the design, implementation, and technology transfer of intelligent systems, and Pitt’s strength in rehabilitation, health sciences and aging research. The primary objectives of the QoLT REU program are to excite undergraduate students about technology and engineering, engage them in cross-disciplinary research in QoLT to gain understanding of how to relate human functions (physiological, physical, social, and cognitive) to the design of intelligent devices and systems that aid and interact with people, expand their knowledge of emerging technologies in QoLT, and prepare them for graduate studies or professional careers in QoLT. More information about the center is available at QoLT.org.

QoLT operates a second REU program in Rehabilitation Engineering and is very interested in attracting qualified students from underrepresented groups to work on robotics projects. The application deadline is February 15, 2010. The program application is here. Contact information and FAQ can be found here, if you have any questions before applying.

The two universities also have a joint NSF IGERT graduate training program in Assistive Technologies , headed by Rory Cooper (Pitt) and Chris Atkeson (CMU), which is seeking students from underrepresented groups. Our partnership with QoLT will provide you access to a large pool of potential mentors in Pittsburgh, and potentially, a route to graduate training in health-related robotics. In addition, QoLT partners with the Florida-Georgia LSAMP , another ARTSI Alliance Partner through which we hope to recruit additional HBCU students and faculty to Alliance activities and eventually Alliance membership.

The Quality of Life Technology Center