Welcome to the Robotics and Automation Society at Portland State University.
We are a group of interdisciplinary faculty, graduate and undergraduate students
and high school students who are fascinated by building robots.
So far, we are programming and building just a few; Rhino is our old-fashioned friend mechanical
arm nearly 20-years old, PSUBOT is an automated wheelchair for the blind
that we designed 10 years ago,
MUVAL is a strange human-animal creature with four hands, two legs and a head - it will
be reasoning using multiple-valued logic. Spider is a hexapod that can dance
and bow, and our other new robots have even no names.
If you want to work on the above or on new robots, please come to our meetings.
Immediately you will obtain a robotic kit to assemble or a program to write.
We share our programs, tools and experiences and we enjoy helping new members.
Although I was building robots more than 30 years ago (I am so far the oldest member of
this group),
our multi-disciplinary Intelligent Robotics
laboratory is very new and it really started in February 2000 with a grant
from Intel Corporation.
Although we are very young, we have quite ambitious plans that include:
- Building the first in the world CYBER-THEATER. Although there exist already
few puppet theaters
in which all puppets are robots, and there exist Internet-controlled robots,
there is no WEB-site with a robotic theater on the Internet.
Our robots will perform plays for the international audience, who will be
observing them through
our Internet camera. Moreover, these plays will be partially interactive and
the tele-viewers will be able to participate in them remotely, each controlling its
robot or a part of it (imagine a head of MUVAL controlled from Sydney and
its legs from Singapure!). Soon the competition will be announced for the first CYBER-PLAY
and artistically-inclined students will modify our robots to resemble animals and other
characters.
- We plan to integrate the software for Machine Learning that we have been developing
for the last 10 years with image processing software and speech recognition/synthesis
software to create a robot that will move, learn, see, hear and talk.
Not only will he talk, he will have his own opinions, and they will be not politically
correct,
we presume.
It will learn by immitating humans and it will automatically collect information
from the Internet.
Whether you are located in Poland or in Japan, in USA or in Australia, you are old
or young, engineer or not, we invite you to join our Society in person or
by tele-presence
Marek Perkowski
Professor of ECE,
Organizer of the Intelligent Robotics Laboratory,
advisor of RAS