Laptop Robotics: Expanding students access and robotics application by mobilizing existing resources

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Computer Science (31)Intellectual Merit: Commodity computation has dramatically increased the efficiency and sophistication with which students investigate almost every field of study. Within CS education, curricula increasingly guide and invite students to explore real datasets with the same tools that professional scientists employ. Robotics, despite being one of the most hardware-dependent subfields of CS, has not fully taken advantage of the ubiquity and low cost of commodity computers, communications, and I/O devices. Physically embodied computation, whether in special-purpose educational kits or specially designed research robots, is still divorced from students' familiar experiences with computing. This project is bridging this gap by building an inexpensive, robotics platform and developing an open-source system for interfacing it via USB with a variety of computing systems. Broader Impact: It is evaluating the prototype platforms in a variety of academic settings in an effort to ultimately bring inexpensive, open-source robots to a diverse community of academic and research institutions.