Jul 17, 2012 | |
Student-designed robots play games, make art, try to catch a toy helicopter (w/video) |
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(Nanowerk News) The first order of business during final presentations in Computer Science 225A, Experimental Robotics, was to get into uniform. | |
Professor Oussama Khatib enthusiastically tossed black T-shirts to class participants crowded in the basement of an engineering building that displayed in bold white letters a mashup of their names and the name of the course. | |
Suited up and ready to play, they were ready for the games to begin. | |
"I know there's going to be a lot of excitement," Khatib said to the packed room. "You've been working day and night. Thank you." | |
Gathered in teams of three or four, the students took turns showing off their creations – robots that play games, make art, help land a toy helicopter. | |
"Every year students come with all of these wonderful ideas," Khatib said. "They are so creative in conceiving a project that's exciting, interactive, dynamic." | |
The BOTicelli robot uses an industrial robotic arm to draw new artistic interpretations of scanned images. | |
Experimental Robotics is a spring quarter class for students who have basic knowledge of robotics. By the end of the course, they are expected to be able to design and build their own 'bot. | |
The day of final presentations brings friends and classmates together to cheer on the accomplishment of creating a machine that completes a task – or tries to. The game-day vibe is made complete with a table filled with snacks and soda. | |
Game day | |
First up were the games. One team designed a robot that plays snooker, a variation of billiards. Another group taught their 'bot how to play carrom, which looks a little like billiards mixed with table shuffleboard. | |
With some clicks on a nearby keyboard, the snooker-playing robot decided the best shot and hit the ball into the pocket – every time. Cheers erupted. | |
Khatib said the challenge with the games was that the robots needed to perceive where the item to strike was on the gameboard and then come up with a calculation to hit it. | |
"We saw robots are almost better than humans because they can do precise calculations of the direction, the impact location," Khatib said. | |
The class moved upstairs for the next set of demonstrations. | |
BOTicelli and RoDin channeled their artist namesakes to, respectively, sketch drawings and etch a relief from wax. | |
RoDin etched the Stanford "S" logo by scraping and scooping wax out with every stroke. The team was challenged by the wax's wavy imperfections. | |
The last project was a mobile helipad, controlled by a robot. The team's goal was to create a robot that could bring a helipad to a remote-controlled toy helicopter. | |
The challenges included the speed at which the helicopter came in for a landing, how steady the helicopter was flying and exactly where it was to hover for the robot to catch it. | |
During the class demonstration held in June, the helicopter never ended up making a perfect landing but got close several times – with onlookers holding their breaths in anticipation and sighing when a dipped wing knocked the aircraft off kilter. | |
"Working with robots is not easy," Khatib said. | |
But they are fun. | |
"Every project brings a lot of energy," Khatib said, "a lot of creativity." |
Source: By Brooke Donald, Stanford University | |
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