Chris Bartley

Mobile robot programming in education

The mobile robot programming laboratory course has been taught at Carnegie Mellon University for the past twelve years. It is a problem-driven class designed for students with little or no experience with robots. In this paper, we first present the current status of the class, and show how it improves the education and training of students in a robotics curriculum by giving them a hands-on experience with a real robot. We show that, in addition to core subjects such as perception, action and cognition, students also have the opportunity to learn advanced topics such as reinforcement learning and multi-robot coordination. We then discuss the evolution of the class under general categories: hardware and programming environment, team experiments, and assignments. We present important lessons learned in each category, and how they affect the learning experience of participating students. We conclude by discussing future opportunities

A visual robot-programming environment for multidisciplinary education

Arts & Bots is an educational program that aims to broaden diversity and participation in technology by integrating arts and crafts with robotics. Arts & Bots is a flexible program that can be integrated into in-school and out-of-school programs in many subject areas. This paper describes the visual programming environment developed for Arts & Bots and its goals of low barriers to entry, classroom compatibility, supporting student acquisition of computational thinking skills, and enabling complex robot behaviors. The authors also compare and contrast the programming environment with other popular visual programming environments, namely Scratch, Alice and LEGO NXT-G.

Active management of a heterogeneous energy store for electric vehicles

The successful introduction of electric vehicles continues to be stifled by the high cost and limited performance life of battery technology. We assert that a disruptive improvement in systems-level cost-of-performance is possible by employing a rate-heterogeneous energy storage system, combining low-rate batteries and high-rate supercapacitors, that is mated to a predictive control system that optimizes power management by exploiting topographic information, traffic history, and specific driver performance. Such predictive power management, optimizing energy storage throughout episodes of vehicle acceleration and regenerative braking, has the potential to significantly decrease the total energy duty on the vehicles batteries.

Terapixel Imaging of Cosmological Simulations

The increasing size of cosmological simulations has led to the need for new visualization techniques. We focus on smoothed particle hydrodynamic (SPH) simulations run with the GADGET code and describe methods for visually accessing the entire simulation at full resolution. The simulation snapshots are rastered and processed on supercomputers into images that are ready to be accessed through a Web interface (GigaPan). This allows any scientist with a Web browser to interactively explore simulation data sets in both spatial and temporal dimensions and data sets which in their native format can be hundreds of terabytes in size or more. We present two examples, the first a static terapixel image of the MassiveBlack simulation, a P-GADGET SPH simulation with 65 billion particles, and the second an interactively zoomable animation of a different simulation with more than 1000 frames, each a gigapixel in size. Both are available for public access through the GigaPan Web interface. We also make our imaging software publicly available.

ChargeCar community conversions: Practical, electric commuter vehicles now!

The technology for practical, short-range electric commuter vehicles (EVs) is here now! The ChargeCar project at Carnegie Mellon University aims to exploit todays technology to make efficient, clean, quiet, commuter electric vehicles available to the public, while providing a basis for local economic development and increasing public awareness of EVs. We have developed a “kit” of modular components that can be used to convert a conventional gasoline-powered car to 100% electric power in a matter of a few days, utilizing commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS) components, along with existing manufacturing facilities and automotive garages. This kit has been installed and tested in two Honda Civics, and has performed well in over 3500 miles of driving. The prototype vehicles have a range of 40+ miles, top speed in excess of 70 mph, and charge overnight on any 120 VAC receptacle. Present efforts are toward commercializing the manufacturing and conversion process, while continuing related research in compound energy sytems - e.g. battery plus ultracapacitor - and pursuing educational efforts with the public and local schools.