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

计算机科学(31)智力价值：商品计算极大地提高了学生研究几乎所有研究领域的效率和复杂性。在CS教育中，课程越来越多地引导和邀请学生使用专业科学家使用的相同工具来探索真实的数据集。尽管机器人学是计算机科学最依赖硬件的领域之一，但它并没有充分利用商用计算机、通信和I/O设备的普及性和低成本。物理实现的计算，无论是在特殊用途的教育工具包中，还是在专门设计的研究机器人中，仍然与学生熟悉的计算经验脱节。该项目正在通过构建一个廉价的机器人平台并开发一个开源系统来弥合这一差距，该系统可以通过USB将其与各种计算系统接口。更广泛的影响：它正在评估各种学术环境中的原型平台，以努力最终将廉价的开源机器人带到不同的学术和研究机构社区。

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.