CS 232 Robots

To learn about state-of-the-art robots, there is an extensive page at the AAAI Topics website devoted to robots: http://www.aaai.org/AITopics/html/robots.html

Nursebot is being developed to serve as a robotic home-care provider that will assist the elderly by combining intelligent reminding, tele-presence for remote care-givers, data collection and surveillance, mobile manipulation, and social interaction.

The da Vinci surgical system is a tele-operated surgical device that gives a surgeon greater precision, dexterity and control of the surgical process. The surgeon controls miniaturized wristed instruments and a high-definition 3-D camera that is inserted through very small incisions. The procedure results in less pain, blood loss and scarring, shorter recovery times, and often yields a better clinical outcome.

See a short video of a surgeon controlling the da Vinci system.

Penelope is a surgical assistant, and automated scrub nurse. It responds to voice commands from the surgeon, hands medical instruments to the surgeon, and keeps track of the instruments to reduce mistakes.

NASA's Robonaut is a humanoid robot that will assist astronauts with on-board repairs on spacecraft. Other NASA robots, such as Urbie who navigates urban environments and snakebots who will explore other planets, are described in How Stuff Works by Tom Harris.

Stanford's Stanley autonomous vehicle won DARPA's 2005 Grand Challenge to race around a difficult 132-mile course in the Mojave Desert, over rough terrain while avoiding obstacles and other impediments. DARPA's real interest, of course, is to promote the development of innovative technologies that will enable the autonomous operation of unmanned ground combat vehicles. The route is about 132 miles long, which Stanley finished in just under 7 hours.

iRobot is building a real unmanned ground vehicle, in addition to PackBots for hazardous operations and its popular Roomba vacuuming robot

Honda's Asimo is a humanoid robot that can walk, climb stairs, recognize people's voices, faces and gestures, and communicate with people

RoboCup is an international joint project to promote AI and robotics through the pursuit of a common problem: building a robotic soccer team. The project integrates research on autonomous agents, multi-agent collaboration, strategy acquisition, real-time reasoning, robotics, sensor-fusion, ...

Goal: "By the year 2050, develop a team of fully autonomous humanoid robots that can win against the human world soccer champion team"

There has been substantial work on 6-legged robots, such as these robots built at IRI in Germany.

Build your own robots in Wellesley's Wintersession Robotic Design Studio!