Robotics mentors area students

The PENNlincs Robotics and C Mentoring Program held its final meeting of the year last Saturday at the University's General Robotic and Active Sensory Perception lab in the 3401 Walnut building. As part of the program, students from the CCA Baldi Middle School in Northeast Philadelphia have worked with University undergraduate and graduate students in computer labs since last fall. The program --Ewhich allows the students to work on C programming and robotics -- pairs a student mentor with two or three children from sixth through eighth grade. During meetings in the GRASP lab, the mentors wrote games and simulations teaching the students how to fill in missing codes. "Through the program, students have learned Hypertext Markup Language, creation of their own Web pages and Java applets, which use C programming," said Chris Massey, co-director of PENNlincs, the educational outreach arm of the Institute for Research in Cognitive Science. Massey added that she wanted to provide a more stimulating experience for the middle school students at the GRASP lab than a typical field trip. Since the program began, the students -- who are all members of CCI's Robotics Club -- have seen both ENIAC and the University's solar-powered car. Massey also invited the students to the GRASP lab to view a LEGO robot which uses C programming. The students and their mentors discussed the complexity of manipulating the LEGO robot to maneuver through different obstacles. The lab's LEGO robot kits are equipped with lights and bumper sensors, but not with cameras, which would used to help coordinate the robots' movement. Although once mounted, the robots' cameras will not provide depth perception, they were will be a major improvement over the current system, under which the robots can only identify each other by using barcodes. Computer and Information Science Professor Ruzena Bajcsy, who is the director of the GRASP lab, and Mechanical Engineering and Applied Mechanics Professor Jim Ostrowski, led the discussions. Both professors have played key roles in the PENNlincs mentoring program, and have been working with the students to create a program allowing a group of robots to work together to play soccer. "The goal is to have a pattern which each robot identifies the other robot by sight, just like we wear jerseys to identify each team," Ostrowski explained. "The robots need to be encoded with a strategy in order to play the game." Post-doctoral student Peter Venetrianer said the middle school students' knowledge of robotics amazed him, adding that many demonstrated clear understanding of programming and technical questions. And Massey noted that the students showed genuine interest in the project and had many suggestions and ideas for future projects. "We are hoping to keep the program going and to keep some of the students coming in over the summer," she said. "Eventually, these kids may be doing some of the programming for the soccer robots."