Building a better ROBOT

t's big enough news that a team of undergraduates from the computer science department built a robot that can recognize names and faces as well as navigate crowded rooms. But taking the top prize in the mobile robotics competition as the only undergraduate team competing at the American Association of Artficial Intelligence's national conference in Edmonton, Canada? Now that's something to talk about.

"Mabel the Mobile Table," a 21st century robotic server, was designed and built by Ben Atwood '03, Dave Feil-Seifer '03, Mike Isman '04, Tom Kollar '04, Eric Meisner '03, Jon Schmid '03, Jenine Turner '03, and Tori Sweetser '03 along with assistance from Diana Calarese '03, Ross Camara '03, Habib Chaudhury '03, Scott Cragg '04, and Aaron Zschau '02. The undergraduates have worked on Mabel for more than a year as part of a research project in the Department of Computer Science.

"This is only something you can learn by doing," says Schmid, who first launched the idea in the summer of 2001. "Developing the software, creating the networks, and putting it all together is incredibly different in practice than it is in a classroom."

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