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GRASP Seminar Series: Spring 2006
January 20, 12:00 p.m., Wu & Chen Auditorium (View Online)
Illah R. Nourbakhsh
Carnegie Mellon University
"The role of social robotics in learning"
Abstract: The Personal Rover Project is a comprehensive effort to develop and deploy a low-cost rover platform for diverse environments, including the home. This rover serves as an exploration-centered, creative outlet for children as they shape the rover's daily and weekly activities. We argue that such a personal rover will excite and inspire users about math, science and engineering.
In this talk, we present early social results of robot-human
interaction in educational spaces, including the Personal Exploration
Rover and Trikebot applications. We then desribe our future plans, including
the newly minted Telepresence Robot Kit effort and our plans to bring
change to technology education processes in both pre-college and college
levels through the use of robotics technologies.
Biography: Illah R. Nourbakhsh is an Associate
Professor of Robotics 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. His current research projects
include educational and social robotics, electric wheelchair sensing devices,
believable robot personality, visual navigation and robot locomotion.
His past research has included protein structure prediction under the
GENOME project, software reuse, interleaving planning and execution and
planning and scheduling algorithms. At the Jet Propulsion Laboratory he
was a member of the New Millenium Rapid Prototyping Team for the design
of autonomous spacecraft. He is a founder and chief scientist of Blue
Pumpkin Software, Inc., which was recently acquired by Witness Systems,
Inc. Illah recently co-authored the MIT Press textbook, Introduction to
Autonomous Mobile Robots.
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