Cynthia Vaskis

SLM521 Spring 2004

Web Quest Assignment – Part 4

4/21/04

File: webquep4.htm

 

Web Quest Part 4 – Who is Building Robots and Why?

 

Process Part 4 - The student is to become familiar with who is designing and building robots for fun and for possible use in space exploration.  What is NASA doing to encourage those people to create new designs possibly for future space missions?  Have the individual student review some of the Web sites about what others are doing to build robots for fun and possibly for space exploration and then answer these questions in small group discussion.

 

1.  What does the acronym NASA stand for?

 

2.  What “First” convention was held in Atlanta, GA on April 14th through 17th, 2004 and who was its host (put it together or organized it)?

 

3. Look in the archives files of the web site below to find out which team won the Championship Round 4 in Florida in March of 2004?

You will have to download a file and determine which format you need for your computer and then watch the play back video of the competition to see the results.

 

4.  What is NASA doing to promote teams of robot builders to create new designs and is there money involved?

 

5.  Look at the LEGO web site about MINDSTORMS and the examples other inventors have made.  Pick your favorite invention that you saw and briefly tell how it works.

 

6.  Name two major universities that have robotics departments and are actively building robots.  Carnegie Mellon and MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology)

 

7.  Other robot building sites and a Robot Club - Look at these sites about what others are doing with robots and decide if you would like to start a robot team at your school to compete in contests.  With the teacher’s approval, take a vote in your classroom of how many people would like to start a Robot Club.  If there are a few or more suggest that you work together to write a letter to your principal describing that you would like to have him/her find a teacher to sponsor the Robot club.  You may suggest this idea to your Science, Math or Computer teacher who may want to host the club in their classroom after school.  Suggest that the club members could contribute to buying the parts to build a robot from either LEGO MINDSTORMS or look on the web for other robot building sources.  Try using the query words “robot build kit” in one of the search engines as www.google.com.  Then your club could enter one of the competitions and travel there to test your robot building skills against others.  Who knows, you could win some money for your club and maybe NASA will use your design for its next robot on the Moon or even Mars.

 

Suggestion:  School Sponsored Robotic Hands-On Activity

 

If the school can afford to purchase a one or more LEGO MINDSTORM robot invention kits, the students could form groups to design and build their own robot out of LEGOs using the classroom‘s computer PC to program it for some selected functions.  The students would be introduced to several different technologies at the same time (electronic motors, building techniques, photographic images from camera, image analysis by simple comparing the images from stereo vision to find the differences.  Show the LEGO examples of others at the LEGO site. http://shop.lego.com/product.asp?p=KB565

 

Look at the web sites listed with each question to find the information you need.

 

NASA Telerobotics Program

http://ranier.hq.nasa.gov/telerobotics_page/telerobotics.shtm

 

Cybernet – Top page.

http://www.cybernet.com/

 

Cybernet Systems Robotics Resources

http://www.cybernet.com/products/robotics.html

 

NASA Space Telerobotics Program – Cool Robot of the Week

http://ranier.hq.nasa.gov/telerobotics_page/coolrobots.html

 

Kennedy space center

http://science.ksc.nasa.gov/

 

Central Florida Regional First Robotic Competition at UCF

http://science.ksc.nasa.gov/robotics/first/ucf-regional-2004/

 

The FIRST contest ended on Sat. 4/17/04 but you can look at the archives which come from the other competitions around the country. I watched the one called the championship round 4 from Florida which was interesting. These huge robots (bigger than people) were trying to remove some large beach balls from some holders. The program is sponsored by NASA, I think to have some people come up with robotic ideas for Bush's plan to take robots to the Moon in the future to help in a human habitat there. I am tying in all of these video web sites and others to my Web Quest page which I will be finishing in a day or two and you can use it to see what is out there as far as Mars rover cams, space station tour clip videos and other stuff. Some other sites related to this one above are below. Note the Kennedy Space Center one has a link to NASA video stuff.

 

FIRST Robotics Competition from Atlanta, GA

http://science.ksc.nasa.gov/robotics/

 

Robotics Education Project - FIRST

http://robotics.nasa.gov/first/2004/nationals.htm
 
FIRST Robotics Competition from Atlanta, GA
http://science.ksc.nasa.gov/robotics/

Kennedy space center
http://science.ksc.nasa.gov/

Central Florida Regional First Robotic Competition at UCF
http://science.ksc.nasa.gov/robotics/first/ucf-regional-2004/

 

Humanoid Robotics Group at MIT

http://www.ai.mit.edu/projects/humanoid-robotics-group/

 

The Robotics Institute at Carnegie Mellon

http://www.ri.cmu.edu/

 

Robotics Institute Seminar, April 9

http://www-2.cs.cmu.edu/afs/cs/project/ri-seminar/www/2004.April.9.html

 

NASA Research – look for robotics in Houston

http://www.nasa.gov/about/research/index.html

 

NASA’s Diplomats

http://www.nasa.gov/missions/solarsystem/f-ssa.html

 

NASA Quest

http://quest.arc.nasa.gov/about/index.html

 

Example Model Robots

 

NASA Space Telerobotics Program – Major projects in robotics

http://ranier.hq.nasa.gov/telerobotics_page/projects.html

 

Robotics Conferences Topics in France

http://www.laas.fr/DARS04/scope.html

 

IEEE-RAS/RSJ International Conference on Humanoid Robots

http://www-2.cs.cmu.edu/afs/cs/project/ri-seminar/www/2004.April.9.html

 

Robotics Institute Seminar, April 9

http://www-2.cs.cmu.edu/afs/cs/project/ri-seminar/www/2004.April.9.html

 

Mars Pathfinder Education and Outreach

http://marsprogram.jpl.nasa.gov/MPF/mpf/education/educoutr.html

 

Check out the robot games for the younger grade school children to see how robots in the cartoon world work.

 

For the younger crowd (pre-K through elementary school) visit the Little Robots web site (http://www.littlerobots.com/Default.asp?x=x).

 

Robot Clip Art - There are several clip art pictures of robots from Microsoft packages available also.

 

LEGO Web sites

 

Meet an inventor and view his robot invention and read some typical questions and answers from him. Also, read how some people have solved robot design problems.

 

http://www.lego.com/eng/explore/productsdetail.asp?x=x&id=7441 or

 

http://www.lego.com/eng/create/x-pod/default.asp

 

Play LEGO games at http://www.lego.com/eng/play/  or http://shop.lego.com/product.asp?p=9730

 

Check out these LEGO MINDSTORM web sites

 

http://mindstorms.lego.com/eng/products/vc/index.asp

 

http://mindstorms.lego.com/eng/community/tutorials/tutorial.asp

 

http://mindstorms.lego.com/eng/community/halloffame/default.asp

 

http://mindstorms.lego.com/eng//community/pioneers/jomaryce/oninventing.asp

 

http://mindstorms.lego.com/eng//community/pioneers/jomaryce/default.asp

 

http://mindstorms.lego.com/eng/inventions/default.asp

 

Check out these inventions

 

other inventions using the camera. (http://mindstorms.lego.com/eng/products/vc/vcuserpreviews.asp)

 

http://mindstorms.lego.com/eng/default.asp

 

http://shop.lego.com/product.asp?p=9730

 

http://shop.lego.com/product.asp?p=9738&t=5&d=13&c=173FD784-51A8-45AE-BAB9-02E173AA327C

 

http://shop.lego.com/product.asp?p=3804&t=5&d=13&c=173FD784-51A8-45AE-BAB9-02E173AA327C

 

http://shop.lego.com/product.asp?p=K9916&t=5&d=13&c=173FD784-51A8-45AE-BAB9-02E173AA327C