Wednesday, December 01, 2004
Robotic education goes to community college & the beautiful "style-bots" of Robo-Garage
First note is an article about Santa Monica College robotics (http://www.smc.edu ), a well-respected community college in LA. I was once the "webmaster" for the school, and I might have hung around if I knew they were going to do robots. According to an article at , SMC will begin Mobile Robotics classes in the Spring 2005 session. According to the release, they will be the first community in California to do this.
This program illustrates a feature of the robotics revolution - an increasing number of non-engineering schools are starting to offer robotics classes. In the past, robots were considered the exclusive domain of high-tech schools like CMU and MIT, with multi-million dollar budgets and pointy-headed engineers and Ai experts.
However, the hobby robot community has demonstrated that non-specialists can participate in the development of robotics, and robotics is now accepted coursework in middle and high schools nationwide. As the leading edge of the "Millennial" generation advances, their knowledge of robots from secondary school is fueling a desire for robotics programs that go beyond the graduate/government contract approach. The SMC courses are a prime example of this - create robots using existing PC technology, and make them practical instead of proving an intellectual point about artificial intelligence.
The expansion of robotics will also involve designers, whose input is increasingly important in all aspects of product development. There will be positions for robotics-specialized industrial designers, as well as a completely new class of "behavioral" designers who will assemble pre-built programming of sensors and effectors into an overall robotic behavior system. They will work closely with industrial designers. In fact, it is likely that a new area of "robotic design" will soon be created - specialist designers who understand both the CAD/CAM of robotics and behavior-based programming. In this they will parallel the game industry, with its groups of game character/world designers creating "look and feel", and game programmers creating the physics and behavior of game characters.
For a peek at the future of robotic design, we need look no further than Kyoto University's Robo-Garage, featuring the stunning work of robotic designer Tomotaka Takahashi. Here's the link - http://www.eonet.ne.jp/~robo-garage/english/index.html. The site showcases the amazing Chronio, along with earlier model Neon (featured at Robodex 2003). In addition, there's Magdan (a classic 'giant robot' design), plus VisiON (using unique 360 degree vision), and Robovie-R (kiosk-bot). All these robots merge great, imaginative design plus a working robot body. A key feature is their walk - unlike most humanoids, they walk straight-legged, Astro-b0y style, rather than the cautious, bent-legged stance of most other robots. In doing this, they show behavioral, as well as physical design.
As robotics progresses, expect to see less and less of "trash cans on wheels" and more of robots like those at Robo-Garage. Expect the artistic design to harken back to fantasy robots (robo-garage takes classic Japanese movie and manga robots as inspiration) but with the additional feature that these robots are real. DO NOT expect the "terminator" - robots attempting to pass for human (like the hapless characters in the Final Fantasy movie) are likely to fail, and ultimately uninteresting. Watch for the a Robotic Design program at a school near you...
.
First note is an article about Santa Monica College robotics (http://www.smc.edu ), a well-respected community college in LA. I was once the "webmaster" for the school, and I might have hung around if I knew they were going to do robots. According to an article at , SMC will begin Mobile Robotics classes in the Spring 2005 session. According to the release, they will be the first community in California to do this.
This program illustrates a feature of the robotics revolution - an increasing number of non-engineering schools are starting to offer robotics classes. In the past, robots were considered the exclusive domain of high-tech schools like CMU and MIT, with multi-million dollar budgets and pointy-headed engineers and Ai experts.
However, the hobby robot community has demonstrated that non-specialists can participate in the development of robotics, and robotics is now accepted coursework in middle and high schools nationwide. As the leading edge of the "Millennial" generation advances, their knowledge of robots from secondary school is fueling a desire for robotics programs that go beyond the graduate/government contract approach. The SMC courses are a prime example of this - create robots using existing PC technology, and make them practical instead of proving an intellectual point about artificial intelligence.
The expansion of robotics will also involve designers, whose input is increasingly important in all aspects of product development. There will be positions for robotics-specialized industrial designers, as well as a completely new class of "behavioral" designers who will assemble pre-built programming of sensors and effectors into an overall robotic behavior system. They will work closely with industrial designers. In fact, it is likely that a new area of "robotic design" will soon be created - specialist designers who understand both the CAD/CAM of robotics and behavior-based programming. In this they will parallel the game industry, with its groups of game character/world designers creating "look and feel", and game programmers creating the physics and behavior of game characters.
For a peek at the future of robotic design, we need look no further than Kyoto University's Robo-Garage, featuring the stunning work of robotic designer Tomotaka Takahashi. Here's the link - http://www.eonet.ne.jp/~robo-garage/english/index.html. The site showcases the amazing Chronio, along with earlier model Neon (featured at Robodex 2003). In addition, there's Magdan (a classic 'giant robot' design), plus VisiON (using unique 360 degree vision), and Robovie-R (kiosk-bot). All these robots merge great, imaginative design plus a working robot body. A key feature is their walk - unlike most humanoids, they walk straight-legged, Astro-b0y style, rather than the cautious, bent-legged stance of most other robots. In doing this, they show behavioral, as well as physical design.
As robotics progresses, expect to see less and less of "trash cans on wheels" and more of robots like those at Robo-Garage. Expect the artistic design to harken back to fantasy robots (robo-garage takes classic Japanese movie and manga robots as inspiration) but with the additional feature that these robots are real. DO NOT expect the "terminator" - robots attempting to pass for human (like the hapless characters in the Final Fantasy movie) are likely to fail, and ultimately uninteresting. Watch for the a Robotic Design program at a school near you...
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