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:
  1. 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.
  2. 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