Collaborative Research: CI-TEAM Demonstration of Remote Robotic Exploration and Experimentation

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Integrating robots into cyberinfrastructure opens up a new possibility: remote exploration and interaction with real environments that may otherwise be inaccessible to teachers and learners. A robotic cyberinfrastucture enables such activities, providing access to real, physical resources that are difficult, if not impossible to duplicate in a virtual world. This project seeks to show that a robotic cyberinfrastructure is a feasible and practical method of making resources available. The primary aim is to enable exploration, experimentation, and interaction with real environments through a remotely controlled robot.This project takes up two distributed activities stretching across a significant geographic distance ? from Waterville, Maine to St. Louis, Missouri. The first project will demonstrate remote exploration of the St. Louis Science Museum by students at Colby College in Maine. The Saint Louis Science Center students will control the actions of the robot ? at a high level ? and interact with people and guides at the Science Museum, using the robot Science Center as a physical avatar. The second project will demonstrate the use of a remote robot by students at Washington University to undertake a series of introductory level biology experiments within the arboretum at Colby College. Students may, for example, explore microclimate effects and connect them with changes in flora and fauna over time in a habitat that is otherwise inaccessible. Students can compare the inaccessible to students in St. Louis results of studies undertaken in the lab on the effects of microclimate, sunlight, or plant growth on small invertebrates ? beetles and ants, for example ? with actual distributions in the Maine woods through the remote robotic explorer. Collectively these activities will demonstrate how the use of a robotic cyberinfrastructure can expand the set of possible lab activities to take into account different climates and geographic locations. The project, as designed, explicitly integrates research and education. Students will be using the remote robots to undertake scientific exploration and experimentation. Through assessment and human-robot interaction studies of how students make use of the robotic cyberinfrastructure, the project will build both a body of knowledge about how to design robotic cyberinfrastructure systems and a kernel of individuals with the knowledge about how to use and design such systems.