Working in teams, children invent their own solution by building a LEGO model and programming it to perform a certain task. Cause and effect learning is enhanced by the models remaining tethered to a computer; similar to scientists in working labs, children can test and adjust their programming in real time. After reflecting on what did and did not work, students can consult with peers, adapt programming, adjust models or begin again.

RoboticsCourseWare.org is similar to MIT's OpenCourseWare (OCW) initiative ... the repository is searchable, browsable, and open for downloads. No registration or login is required for accessing the posted materials. Materials are typically made available under a Creative Commons License ...

... we have published materials for four courses: Introduction to Autonomous Mobile Robots; Robotics: Science and Systems; Introduction to Robotics; Motion Planning and Applications. Materials available for these courses include lecture slides and notes, course exercises, examinations, laboratory projects, code repositories, videos, and other media.

The company had already considered and discarded video conferencing as too expensive and less convenient. That led to the birth of POGO at a cost of about $8,000 to $9,000...

... having the robot enables team members to use white boards to explain concepts to the offshore team and get instant reactions instead of trying to communicate through phone or e-mail.

AMAM 2008 was a one-week, single-track conference, including four keynotes, over 70 posters, and a "robot zoo" populated by a menagerie of mobile machines. The coffee break buzz indicated that most of the 150 attendees found the meeting to be a superb confluence of the cutting edge in bio-inspired robotics. Locomotion specialists from both biology and engineering were well represented, and the meeting continually broke down barriers between disciplines to focus on the shining promise of the field: highly functional robots built using biologically derived principles, which in turn serve as embodied models to address otherwise impractical questions in biology. An additional innovation at this conference was the invitation of several biomedical engineers working on ways to recover function in paralyzed human patients using intuitive brain-machine interfaces. As for the venue, Cleveland may not be the most exotic of destinations but it has an all-American cultural history steeped in the industrial tradition, and during the conference the attendees gathered at Case's sprawling campus were able to experience the city's quite pleasant late-spring weather. And if you're wondering, as many do, the name of the university dates to the 1967 merger of the Case Institute of Technology and the Western Reserve University, with "western reserve" referring to the formerly pristine and resource-rich Great Lakes region of the early 19th century. Though I didn't see a single uninteresting presentation, I'll highlight just a few that I found especially exciting, in chronological order. Hunter Peckham, an engineer at Case and executive director of the Cleveland Functional Electrical Stimulation Center, gave a keynote address on some of his recent studies and clinical trials in functional electrical stimulation. This work involves implanting electrodes to deliver electric pulses to the muscles of paralyzed people. Control of a limb is a difficult problem because there are more degrees of freedom (joints and muscles) than there are constraints (desired limb positions). Peckham first simulated the mechanics of the musculoskeletal system to decide which muscles were strictly necessary for a desired range of arm motions, then examined the neural architecture to determine which points should be stimulated to differentially activate those muscles in a useful way. Two patients have received these radio-controlled implants, which are activated by coupling stimulation to recorded activity in muscles which are still under voluntary control. For example, the patient may still be able to twitch his or her cheek, so electrical activity in the cheek muscles would be detected and would be used to trigger stimulation of a particular subset of arm muscles. Two or three co-contracting muscle groups are sufficient for a patient to feed him- or herself, representing a major improvement in quality of life. Photo: Developed at the Cleveland FES Center, an external controller sends commands to an implanted device that jolts Jennifer French's muscles into action in the correct sequence, allowing her to stand up out of her wheelchair. Read more: Neural Engineering's Image Problem (IEEE Spectrum, April 2004) Photo by Ed Macdonald

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Photo: Kanzaki-Takahashi Laboratory The second full day of talks was sponsored by Mobiligence, a research consortium consisting of engineers and biologists at several Japanese universities. Their backing brought a significant international flavor to the conference. One thought-provoking talk was given by plenary speaker Ryohei Kanzaki, of the University of Tokyo. His research team is investigating the mechanisms by which silkworm moths walk toward the source of an airborne odor. He has built a large anatomical and physiological database of uniquely identifiable neurons in the moth's brain which contribute to its ability to track an odor plume. Using optical recording techniques, Kanzaki can associate activity in these neurons with the presence of an odor. He has built a hybrid robot in order to investigate the algorithm the moth uses to localize the odor source. In this setup, the moth walks in place on top of a trackball, and the output signal of the trackball is used to control the vehicle on which the moth and trackball are sitting. Small fans waft the odor from the floor up to the moth's antennae. This moth-driven robot is capable of localizing an odor source in a manner qualitatively similar to a real moth. Experimentally altering the feedback loop by changing the sign or gain of the coupling between the moth's walking and the robot's movement (and subsequent contact with the odor plume) affects the moth/robot's ability to find the odor source.

Wall Racers was made by 2 cheap (and crap driving) RC cars. I gave them sensors (SRF05), tuned with an extra battery, and gave them own logic / "robot-brains" (Picaxe 28). Primary target is to stay close to the wall, drive fast, and overtake the other :)

The team behind the iCub robot believes that robots, like children, learn best from experience. Like a toddler who progressively learns about his own motor skills and how to interact with the world, the iCub—the size of a 3-year-old child, with sensor-equipped hands, eyes, and ears—has touch, sight, and hearing to explore its surroundings and develop its cognitive abilities. The iCub is the baby of RobotCub, the European Union–funded project that aims to advance research on the use of humanoid robots to understand human learning. Scientists in Europe and beyond believe humanoids can be essential tools in the study of human intelligence, which many of them argue is linked to the structure of the human body and the way it can interact with its surroundings. Their argument: because the physical body and its actions together play as much of a role in cognition as does the brain, mimicking human actions is essential to understanding the components of intelligence, like reasoning or memory.