II-NEW: Multi-Robot Lab For Quality of Life Applications proposal for CISE Computing Research Infrastructure (CRI) http://www.nsf.gov/pubs/2011/nsf11536/nsf11536.htm 1 Introduction NSF funds will support the purchase of ?? small humanoid robots to establish a multi-robot research and education facility. Our vision of the future is on in which humans interact with a large number of devices and robots in a human-robot community. In order to develop the research and educational foundation for such a future, we propose establishing a multi-robot research and education facility at CMU. We will focus on research and education about how robots can help everyone, with additional emphasis on helping children with developmental disorders and older adults. To work towards a future of human-robot community, we need to develop techniques for multi-robot per- ception, control, learning from experience, and human-robot interaction. We need to explore how multiple robots can help each other perform better, and exchange information effectively to achieve useful tasks. We have extensively explored how individual robots operate in human environments and have investigated and developed multi-robot systems in customized environments. We are now ready to experiment with multiple robots in our daily human environments. Faculty who have expressed an interest in such a research facil- ity include faculty from the Robotics Institute (Atkeson, Kanade, Likhachev, Rybski, Siegel, Thorpe), CSD (Touretzky, Veloso), HCII (Forlizzi, Cassell), MLD (Gordon), LTI (Rudnicky), and Mechanical Engineering (Messner). Choset will participate in his role as Director of the Robotics Undergraduate Minor. Example re- search projects include studies on how the sensors on all robots can be most effectively combined to monitor a large space, how to allocate resources to handle errors and emergencies (a human or robot accident such as a spill), and how such a system can be used to present a consistent interface to humans traveling through the space. We also contemplate experiments in which the robots are installed in other facilities such as a nursing home, where we would do studies as to how a team of robots could make residents happier, monitor residents, and reduce the burden on caregivers. We expect the underlying foundational issues of multi-robot perception, control, and interaction to be very similar at our multiple study sites. We also expect the multi-robot facility to play a major role in education. We have several coursesthat already use small numbers of simple robots to work towards these goals (including 15-491: CMRoboBits: Creating Intelligent Robots, 16-264: Humanoids, and 16-362: Mobile Robot Programming Laboratory). With the availability of this multi-robot facility, we will see inclusion of hands on robotics in courses on AI, machine learning, HCI, speech (LTI), optimization, mechanical engineering, and programming. We also expect extensive involvement in Andrew’s Leap, the SAMS program, and other K-12 and minority outreach. We believe two possible applications will be wildly motivating for undergraduates. The first is team sports (Figure 1). We find that the element of competition is highly motivating for students. We also find that interactive games and theater is a rich realm for developing and exploring human-robot interaction. With a set of robots, video games can become physical games. One proposed educational project is a robot play or musical. We have found that story-based projects are especially attractive and engaging for women students. This is a link to a class project with an early NAO robot in the CMRoboBits class of 2009: www.youtube.com/watch?v=hdX498wBftM. This is a link from some of the Creative Technology Night for Girls work: www.youtube.com/watch?v=0DTJ14hTG3I. We are focusing on humanoid robots for two reasons. The first is that there are complete humanoid robots now available in the market, which are aiming to serve both research and education, and for which we will be able to negotiate a significantly reduced price. The second reason is that the humanoid robot artifact offers compelling research and educational features, including a complex and motivating articulated 1
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II-NEW: Multi-Robot Lab For Quality of Life Applications
proposal for CISE Computing Research Infrastructure (CRI)