CREATE Lab
Community Robotics, Education and Technology Empowerment
Newell-Simon Hall A504
412.268.6723

Illah R. Nourbakhsh
Robotics Institute
Carnegie Mellon University
Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania 15213
illah@cs.cmu.edu

The CREATE Lab brings together our mission in furthering Human-Robot Interaction with our desire to disruptively redefine how communities can make sense of their context through the use of robotic technologies. In our past research, we have demonstrated in isolated pilot projects that technology education does not need to be the province of the few. We have shown that hands-on approaches to learning that use technology as inspirations for wonder and discovery can lead to lifelong learning skills such as teamwork, problem-solving and self-identification with technology as a tool for exploration and personal expression. The CREATE lab aims to scale up our efforts in order to create self-sustaining communities of learning, expression and technology empowerment. Each project is funded by technology partners and local foundations to demonstrate the creation of sustainable programs that combine technology education with issues and activities that students of all ages care about and therefore have a vested interest in pursuing. As part of this goal we develop new technologies, kits, curricula and evaluation methodologies. Our policy is to open-source and disseminate as much of this material as is practical so that both research and effective use of technology in the formal and informal learning setting can grow as quickly as possible.

To catalyze local and global community change by technologically empowering people to creatively explore, learn, share and directly improve our ecology.

To design, create, and disseminate robotic curricula and technologies that enable diverse peoples to make significant civic contributions to our quality of life. We aim to:

• Design technology that is broadly accessible to non-experts.
• Collaborate directly with citizens and community centers during all phases of work.
• Focus first on three critical issues on which technologically empowered communities can have maximum impact: learning, wellness, and sustainable living.

The CREATE Lab is also the home lab of the Toy Robots Initiative. This initiative aims to commercialize robotics technologies for education and toy entertainment.

The ChargeCar project explores active control of batteries in an effort to improve battery life for electric vehicles. Specifically we are designing new low-cost power control modules for battery testing and doing very large-scale sensitivity analysis of battery performance while varying environmental conditions, driving behavior, and current bandpass filtering using ultracap / supercap "buffers". By collecting data away from the well-known power schedules usually used for testing, then doing comprehensive data mining, we wish to show if in fact there are controllable factors that can have significant impact on the economics of battery electric vehicles.

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The Civil War Trails project is a pioneering effort in historic and touristic geovisualization, bringing together partners from across the Commonwealth to showcase Pennsylvania's rich Civil War history via high-resolution panoramas and Google Earth. The way students learn about the people and events of the Civil War changes dramatically when they are able to see the places on the globe, zoom in on the present-day aerial view and then enter GigaPan panoramas to experience the vastness of the battlefields and read the headstones of the fallen. The project also aims to make visiting the region easier, allowing users to move between Google Earth and the Department of Tourism's online resources for visitors.

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The goal of the CMUcam project is to provide simple vision capabilities to small embedded systems in the form of an intelligent sensor. There are multiple CMUcam generations typically consisting of a color CMOS camera, a frame buffer, and a low-cost microcontroller. The latest CMUcam is fully programmable and comes with numerous open source example applications and libraries including JPEG compression, frame differencing, color tracking, convolutions, histogramming, edge detection, servo control, connected component analysis, FAT file system support, and a face detector.

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We are developing a curriculum for the Introduction to Computer Science (CS1) course taught at two and four year colleges and for high school Computer Science courses. These courses will use robots as interactive tools to highlight concepts and motivate students. We have developed a robot platform and Java-based software environment to allow students to quickly and easily start programming robots and are currently testing robots and associated curricular materials at two community colleges.

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The Fine Outreach for Science, sponsored by the Fine Foundation, provides GigaPan units to scientists and documents the evolution of GigaPan as a research tool. The first phase is following seven scientists around the world as they explore the potential of GigaPan panoramas for scientific discovery, collaboration, and dissemination. The research targets range from botanical diversity in New Zealand to glacier melting in Norway. Partners include universities on four continents and the Jane Goodall Institute in Africa.

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GigaPan is the newest development of the Global Connection Project, which aims to help us meet our neighbors across the globe, and learn about our planet itself. GigaPan will help bring distant communities and peoples together through images that have so much detail that they are, themselves, the objects of exploration, discovery and wonder. We believe that enabling people to explore, experience, and share each other's worlds can be a transforming experience. Our mission is to make all aspects of the GigaPan experience accessible and affordable to the broadest possible community.

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Global Connection is a joint project of Carnegie Mellon University, NASA, Google, and National Geographic. The project's long-term goal is to help us learn about and meet our neighbors across this globe, and learn about our planet itself. The team is motivated by the desire to encourage global citizenship and understanding by connecting people, places and events through the utilization, exploration and sharing of dynamically viewable images.

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Hear Me amplifies kids' voices using media and technology to create a world where kids are heard, acknowledged and understood, giving them the power to inspire social change. Hear Me is a collaborative network of community organizations, institutions, businesses and foundations working together to provide a better future for our kids. Hear Me is a conduit for our kids voices that promotes the purposeful and responsible use of media by and for kids that can stimulate change in their lives, their communities, and the world.

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A collaboration between the CREATE Lab and the Pittsburgh Association for the Education of Young Children, Message from Me enables young children to better communicate with parents about their daytime activities at child care centers through the use of digital cameras, microphones, email, phone messaging and other technologies. Children ages 3-5 are developing language, social and other crucial life skills during the day but, because of their limited ability to recollect and communicate, are unable to fully express what they did "at school" to their parents. By adapting existing technologies so that these young children can record their daily experiences and send them to their parents, Message from Me will enhance parent-child conversations in ways that impact the child's feeling of individuality, self-confidence and well-being.

Neighborhood Networks is a long-term research project that combines community arts, participatory design, informal learning, and engineering to articulate and discover how communities use emerging technologies, specifically robotics. Through interviews, participant observation, generative workshops, and participatory design, the Neighborhood Networks project focuses on working with neighborhood groups that are organized for local representation and collective action. Our interest is how these neighborhood groups use or might use emerging technologies as a means to publicly address their concerns.

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As Pittsburgh prepared to observe its 250th Anniversary in 2008, the Robotics Institute at Carnegie Mellon University joined in the celebrations by including our region's leading role in robotics education and research, which stretches back to the 1920s. But more than just looking back, Robot 250 highlighted the future of Pittsburgh, emphasizing educational and creative opportunities in robotics.

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A Robot Diary is a customizable robot designed to serve as a means of expression for its creator. Using light, sound, and movement, users can choreograph their Robot Diaries to be responsive to a diary entry or other piece of text. Users can also enter into a community where they are able to share the contents of their Robot Diary with others. Ultimately, the robot diary provides a unique means of exploring, expressing, and sharing emotions, ideas and thoughts while promoting technological literacy and informal learning.

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The TeRK project aims to make educational robotics accessible to a large community of college and pre-college students as well as home and hobby robot enthusiasts. To this end TeRK includes the development of affordable robot designs that can be built with hand tools and commercially available off-the-shelf parts. TeRK also includes the development and evaluation of a library of curriculum to accompany these robots; development of a robot embedded electronics package; open-source software libraries; and a web community where curriculum, software, and robot designs can be readily exchanged.

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The UNESCO school exchange seeks to promote empathy and understanding between cultures and create a greater sense of community through an exchange of explorable, high-resolution digital imagery. Using a robotic camera provided by the program, children in partner schools identified by UNESCO take explorable, high-resolution panoramic images of the world around them, and share them with their contemporaries around the globe. The sharing of their community?s sites, landmarks, events, and places of importance to them encourages self-reflection and a deeper understanding of community and self-identity.

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