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Columns::March 11, 2002
Civil rights scholar will deliver annual Holmes-Hunter Lecture
New partnership chronicles ‘unsung foot soldiers’
Multicultural studies pioneer will give Tresp Lecture
Annual Nunn Forum focuses on commercialization of the academy
$16,000 in prize money awarded at first marketing research competition
National search gets under way for new grad dean
Veterinary Medicine students take part in Spay Day
‘Taste’ of research whetted library director’s appetite for archival work
Health center earns JCAHO accreditation
Retirees
Newsmakers
Forum essay: To understand us, others must learn English. . .
Tenor of the matter
Campus News
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| Don Potter (center) of the computer science department taught a trial run class in robotics this past fall. David Boucugnani (left) and David Barnhard were two of the 15 students in the class. (Photo by Peter Frey) |
Looking for the cheese
Robotics course combines smart machines with student interest
By Phil Williams
phil@franklin.uga.edu
David Boucugnani’s epiphany came at about two o’clock in the morning.
He and his classmates David Barnhard and David Caveney had been working for hours to make their wheeled robot wander across a surface of a table, find an object referred to as “the cheese,” then roll back, start over and head for it in a straight line. The class’s teacher, Don Potter in the department of computer science, was no help at all. He designed the problems. The students had to find the solutions.
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“We finally found out we could trip a counter by putting chariot spokes on each of the two rear wheels,” says Boucugnani, a first-year graduate student in artificial intelligence. “It finally worked, but it was intensive.” Ben-Hur, eat your heart out.
The three students were part of a pioneering course offered this past fall as a trial run for a permanent course in robotics that will begin soon. Though it was held as an independent study course last year, it will be a regular class starting fall semester 2002.
“We had room for 15 students in the trial run class, and it filled up in about two seconds,” says Potter, who designed the course and used several commercially available robotics kits to teach it. “Everybody had a great time, and they learned some cool stuff. I think the interest in the regular course will be strong.”
If student reaction to the independent study class is any indication, “strong interest” from students may be an understatement. Many of the class participants became nearly obsessive about solving the series of robotic problems or “challenges” that Potter set out.
While the class required some technical work--soldering, wiring and constructing the small mobile robots that had to learn mazes, find the “cheese” and perform other tasks--most of it revolved around writing computer code. The class, broken into teams, had two types of robots: one was small and used a computer microcontroller with a tiny memory; the second was operated by a Palm Pilot.
The problems required innovation, clear thinking, problem solving and a knowledge of computer languages. The smaller robots operated with controllers that could handle only two kilobytes, an almost laughable amount in today’s climate of mega-gigs. The students had to use a simple programming language called P-Basic to allow the computers to solve their “challenges.”
“Two K of memory on a chip sounds like almost nothing these days, but you can do a lot with it,” says Potter. “Remember, we put men on the moon with about that much.” (Still, the solution to one challenge required nearly a thousand lines of P-Basic code.)
The first challenge was to make the robot move in a squared figure-eight, and the second was to write a program to make it solve a maze. Some students added “whiskers” to their robots so they could feel their way around; others relied on photo or infrared sensors. As they solved one problem after another, the teams began to personalize their robots, adding extra touches.
“The Palm Pilot robot kit has eight megs of storage, which is obviously a lot more,” says Boucugnani, “so it could do different things.” Programmers also had to write Palm Pilot programs in a more complicated computer language, called C++.
Although the group did have a textbook, there was no “answer” to the problems.
“For the Palm Pilot robot, there was a little more online to find,” says Barnhard, “but in the end, everybody took their own approach.”
While this robotics class is not at the level of such courses offered at advanced engineering schools, it is a first step in introducing students to a new class of machines. Robots already paint, weld and do dozens of jobs in production lines. Potter says a new Pirelli tire plant under construction near Rome, Ga., will have some of the most sophisticated production-line robots in the world. He has seen comparable robots in action at a Nissan auto plant.
A number of robotics kits are sold commercially, including a Lego version that retails for about $200 and others that are more sophisticated. Putting a Lego robot together isn’t much of a chore; programming it to perform even simple tasks is something else entirely.
“One big problem is power, and one night we thought if it ran well with this much [battery] power, it would run better with a lot more,” says Boucugnani. “What happened was that when we added more batteries, the extra power immediately fried the servos [motors] and we thought we were out of business. Fortunately, we recovered.”
Barnhard agrees, pointing to one of the main problems of building robots: “It’s very surprising how quickly it can all go wrong.”
Both Boucugnani and Barnhard said the course was an energizing and pleasant challenge, despite the 1980s computer language and 1970s computer memory in the smaller robot. In fact, there’s talk of creating a UGA computer kit that can be sold on the market as some other colleges have been doing for years.
They are thinking of calling the UGA robot Archie.
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