Aug. 13, 2002 

Michael Mewhinney / Jonas Dino                                                              

NASA Ames Research Center, Moffett Field, Calif.                                       

Phone: 650/604-5612 or 650/604-9000                                                         

jdino@mail.arc.nasa.gov

RELEASE: 02-91AR

NOTE TO EDITORS AND NEWS DIRECTORS: Media representatives are invited to see a demonstration of sophisticated robots built by 30 high school students on Friday, Aug. 16, from 11:00 a.m. PDT to 4:00 p.m. PDT, at Carnegie Mellon West, located in Bldg. 17 at NASA Ames Research Center. News media need only show a photo ID to gain access to Moffett Field.

STUDENTS TO DEMONSTRATE SOPHISTICATED ROBOTS AT NASA

Thirty Bay Area high school students will demonstrate the amazing capabilities of their newly-constructed robots on Friday, Aug. 16, capping a seven-week summer robotics camp held at NASA.

The demonstration will begin at 11:00 a.m. PDT and continue until 4:00 p.m. PDT in the lobby and in front of Carnegie Mellon West, located in Bldg. 17 at NASA Research Park.

The robots were constructed during this summer’s July 1 to Aug. 16 robotics camp offered by Carnegie Mellon University at its west coast campus. The camp was offered in collaboration with NASA Ames Research Center, located in California’s Silicon Valley, and the National Hispanic University, San Jose, Calif.

Students in the ‘Robotic Autonomy’ program built, programmed and operated their personal vision-based, mobile robots as they learned about the electronics, mechanics and computer science of robotic systems. The Robotic Autonomy course was taught by Illah Nourbakhsh, assistant professor of robotics at Carnegie Mellon’s Robotics Institute in Pittsburgh. Nourbakhsh is co-founder of the institute’s Toy Robots Initiative and conducts research in electric wheelchair sensing devices, robot learning, theoretical robot architecture, believable robot personality, visual navigation and robot locomotion. Nineteen of the robotics camp’s class of 30 students are Latino high school juniors and seniors from the San Jose area, including the new Latino College Preparatory Academy located on the National Hispanic University campus.

The Robotic Autonomy course represents Carnegie Mellon’s first outreach program on its west coast campus at the NASA Research Park. Courses leading to master’s degrees in software engineering and e-business will begin in the fall. The west coast campus is a branch of Carnegie Mellon University, which is located in Pittsburgh, and known as one of the world’s premier institutions for information technology research and education.

For more information about robotic autonomy, see:

www.cs.cmu.edu/~rasc

For more information about Carnegie Mellon West, see:

http://west.cs.cmu.edu

For more information about the National Hispanic University, see:

www.nhu.edu

-end-

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