Robot babies??

This is from IEEE Spectrum's Robotics Newsletter:

http://spectrum.ieee.org/slideshow/robotics/humanoids/robot-babies-cute-or-creepy

Class schedule for Fall 2011

The class schedule for "Robotics for Grandparents" for Fall 2011 has been set.

This is a six-week class, meeting once per week.

The first class meeting will be at 9:30 AM on Monday, September 12th.  It will last 1 hour and 15 minutes.

Class dates for your calendar:

September 12, 19, 26
October 3, 10, 17

Due to the limited amount of lab equipment available, enrollment is strictly limited to 8 students.

Students should have a basic familiarity with the running of applications under Windows, but do not need any knowledge of programming, engineering, or robotics.

Most of the class sessions will include a few minutes of lecture followed by hands-on lab.

Encino Park Robotics Club

Last Friday, April 15th, I visited the Robotics Club at Encino Park Elementary School and gave a slide presentation "Space Robots I Have Known".  At the beginning of the presentation, I passed around a couple of space program artifacts from my bookshelf: a wooden mockup of a spacecraft "black box", made of white pine, and a pushbutton "ENTER" switch from the Shuttle Orbiter's Cockpit Avionics Upgrade program, which was cancelled.

The presentation took about 40 minutes, and was followed by viewing of some live-action and animated videos showing the space robots in action.

The club members, all 5th graders, had many interesting questions about what those robots could do.

JPL Mars Rover "Curiosity" article and great animation

This article from IEEE Spectrum Robotics newsletter shows the complete landing and deployment sequence of this new robotic rover. 

http://spectrum.ieee.org/automaton/robotics/industrial-robots/jpl-animation-shows-off-new-mars-rovers-harrowing-travel-plan

IEEE Spectrum Robotics Newsletter

IEEE Spectrum is a magazine for members of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, and is sent to all members.  Spectrum also has an e-mail "Robotics Newsletter" that is sent out twice a month, at no charge, to anyone who subscribes.  The Robotics Newsletter is well-written and always has interesting content.

You can subscribe to the newsletter at http://spectrum.ieee.org/static/newsletters, and you can unsubscribe anytime.

Plan for future course

For the past two years, I have not included any bot-building in the Robotics for Grandparents course.  I have found a good starter robot design that may just do the trick.  I'll be using the SPOT design from James Floyd Kelly's excellent book, "Lego Mindstorms NXT-G Programming Guide".  The students (each team) will get a bag of parts and a photocopy of the build instructions for SPOT.  I have found that having the parts pre-picked saves a lot of time.

On the right you see a picture of SPOT from the book.  Between now and next September I will tinker with SPOT and see how he fits in with my class lab exercises.

EP Robotics Club

I went to the Encino Park Robotics Club meeting on Friday.  The kids were preparing for the January competition held by Texas Computer Education Association.  They have a difficult problem to solve, but I think they will do fine.  The field is set up with 5 cans of Big Red placed in randomly selected places on a circle, and the task is to push as many as possible to the wall.  This means the kids need to anticipate the locations of the cans and deal with the randomness somehow.  I was impressed by how well they demonstrated they could solve the problem and get a good score.

You can see a video of last year's contest at http://www.tcea.org/collaborate/robotics/Pages/index.aspx.

The competition is in New Braunfels on January 8th.