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News Brief
- July 21, 2009
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CMU / ARTSI team takes first place in IJCAI Student Robotics Challenge
Students from Carnegie Mellon and four historically black universities teamed up to take first place and win a special acknowledgment in the IJCAI 2009 Student Robotics Challenge. The students used the Chiara hexapod robot designed in CMU's Tekkotsu lab (see Chiara-Robot.org).
The team consisted of:
Ethan Tira-Thompson (CMU Robotics PhD student), Alex Grubb (CMU CS PhD student), and four undergraduates: Owen Watson (Florida A&M University), Samantha Beal (North Carolina A&T University), Julian Strothers (Hampton University), and Charlston Manning (Morehouse College).
The team was advised by Professor David Touretzky, head of the Tekkotsu Lab. All four undergraduates are interning in the lab this summer. An affiliated entry from Florida A&M University, submitted by graduate student Sherene Campbell with her advisor, Professor Clement Allen, also used the Chiara robot, and received a judges' award for contributions to an emerging architecture.
The joint work on the robotics challenge reflects CMU's prominent role in the ARTSI Alliance, an NSF-funded consortium of 13 historically black colleges and universities and 10 major research universities that works to attract African American students to careers in computer science and robotics research. The Alliance is headed by Professor Andrew Williams of Spelman College. Touretzky serves as the lead co-PI and Director of Robotics Education.
The Chiara is a new platform designed for teaching undergraduates the computer science side of robotics. It uses the Tekkotsu open-source software framework developed at Carnegie Mellon. Several schools in the ARTSI Alliance have received Chiara robots funded by a gift from Seagate Research. Additional funding for ARTSI activities has come from grants from the Motorola Foundation, Google, Intel, Boeing, Apple, and iRobot.
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Left to right: Ethan Tira-Thompson, Clement Allen, Owen Watson, Sherene Campbell, David Touretzky. Not shown: Alex Grubb, Samantha Beal, Julian Strothers, and Charlston Manning.
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About Carnegie Mellon: Carnegie Mellon is a private research university with a
distinctive mix of programs in engineering, computer science, robotics, business,
public policy, fine arts and the humanities. More than 10,000 undergraduate and
graduate students receive an education characterized by its focus on creating
and implementing solutions for real problems, interdisciplinary collaboration,
and innovation. A small student-to-faculty ratio provides an opportunity for
close interaction between students and professors. While technology is pervasive
on its 144-acre Pittsburgh campus, Carnegie Mellon is also distinctive among
leading research universities for the world-renowned programs in its College of
Fine Arts. A global university, Carnegie Mellon has campuses in Silicon Valley, Calif.,
and Qatar, and programs in Asia, Australia and Europe.
For more, see www.cmu.edu.
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Gates and Hillman Centers Photo Tour
