Friday Tech Talks : Who Made Who? Insights from programming a personal robot

Friday Tech Talks : Who Made Who? Insights from programming a personal robot

Tim Lukau, Computer Science and Ash Black, Eller Tech Core

The TEMI Personal Robot is a commercial Android-based robot that navigates something like a Rumba but with much better dance moves! Building upon native programing features such as LiDAR-based navigation and human recognition, coders at Tech Core have created new capabilities with a Web-based API that dramatically expands and simplifies adding robot skills. Presently the robot recognizes people, can deliver personal messages, and offers insights into point-of-interest around the facility. Most interestingly, we have witnessed how crowd interaction in the Eller Tech Garage between the robot and students has been overwhelmingly positive. There seem to be qualities to the interaction that are non-technical and that we think might be of interest to educators, computer scientists, and anthropologists – a certain “C3PO-ness” quality to the robot that simultaneously disarms and engenders a kind of affection. Perhaps it is a human propensity to project empathically… or is it a sense of personality emerging from trivial blocks of code that somehow, when multiplied together, become complex and recognizable as something worth a second look, or someone?  Please join us as we showcase TEMI, his best moves, and insights and spring 2020 breakthroughs from the developers. 

Date:
Friday, February 21, 2020 Show more dates
Time:
12:00pm - 1:00pm
Location:
CATalyst Studios
Audience:
  Open to all  
Categories:
  CATalyst Studios     Lecture/talk