Photos by Chris Meyer
IU South Bend computer scientist Jim Wolfer uses robots to provide his students with visual feedback for tactile assembly language programming. Because assembly language requires great attention to small details, his tuna-can-sized robots, traveling through a maze and hitting a wall, for example, makes students instantly aware of program errors.
IUB sophomore Evan DeMond hooks up his retrofitted Goofy Giggles, a child's toy made by Little Tikes and used as a pedagogical tool in an Honors College section of Computer Structures, taught by Geoffrey Brown.
Nick Venstra (left), an IU Cyclotron Facility staff member, and Ceyhun Sunsay, a post-doc student at the IUB Department of Psychology, work together to assemble a robot at the IU Robotics Club in Bloomington.
Daniel Carmody, 12, (left) and David Osborn, 13, of Chesterton Middle School compete in the "Robo Billiards" event at the Indiana Science Olympiad in Bloomington last month. "Robo Billiards" challenges participants to move pool balls with their robot from the center of a platform to buckets on the corners.
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The Jetsons hit prime time in 1962, and one thing Baby Boomers took for granted from then on was this: Domesticity in adulthood would include ownership of a Rosie the Robot that would steam our space food, vacuum the Astroturf and walk the robotic dog--all the kinds of things our humanoid maternal figure was doing in our Earth-bound homes of origin.
Alas, there is no Rosie. Sony's Aido, a canine "entertainment robot" which can actually serve as a watchdog, is as close to a domestic family associate as we may have in the 21st century.
And while sadly absent in the household, robots are functioning in many shapes and forms in medicine, in commerce and in education, among many other fields.
A 1,000-pound surgical assistant named da Vinci, for instance, is featured in a story in the winter 2004 edition of Indiana University Medicine. Clarian Health Partners surgeons, whose program in robotic surgery ranks among the top three in the country, are using da Vinci to repair mitral valves, esophageal conditions, chronic heartburn and urological and gynecological problems, among more than 150 procedures.
The Zymark robot that the Hershey Foods Corporation donated to the IU School of Informatics a couple years ago (http://www.informatics.iupui.edu/n/90) was once used to mix flavors in the research department of the Pennsylvania-based milk chocolate factory and is now a teaching robot in the school's Laboratory Informatics Graduate Program.
During the past year, HP photographer Chris Meyer has photographed several purely pedagogical robots that you see, and we know there are many more out there, including a robotic species made from LEGOs. Jeff Nowak at IPFW's School of Education has been partnering in a "Destination Mars" project with science teacher James Dettmer at Perry Hill Elementary School. Nowak's college students and Dettmer's fourth graders have been colluding on the project, building robots replete with remote-controlled cameras that stand ready to land on a simulated Martian surface, thanks to software similar to what NASA uses in its Mars rovers.
What's the future for robots? MIT robotics guru Rodney Brooks told an audience at Cornell University last week that major changes are ahead for intelligent robots, and that humans may find it hard to deal with machines that are more intelligent than they are. Mankind "has had a long history of retreat from 'specialness,'" Brooks was quoted in the Cornell Daily Sun.
Fast fact: The word "robot," according to most sources, was coined by Czech painter Josef Capek, and comes from the Czech word for "labor." A 1930 play by his brother, Karel Capek, called R.U.R-(Rossum's Universal Robots), was the first literary use of the word.
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