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CMU freshman designs and builds desktop robot A boy and his toy Monday, November 06, 2000 By Byron Spice, Science Editor, Post-Gazette
Life just keeps speeding up for Greg Reshko.
He was a member of the research staff at Carnegie Mellon University's Robotics Institute before he was even out of high school and now, after graduating from Allderdice High School last spring, the 17-year-old is a CMU freshman.
Things have gotten busier in the last few weeks. Last winter, he took a handheld Palm Pilot and incorporated it into a desktop robot. A month ago, a Web site for technogeeks, slashdot.org, posted an item about the robot, bringing a flood of hits to CMU's Palm Pilot Robot Web page and interest from news media. A little more than a week ago, a Boulder, Colo., company licensed its commercial rights and began taking orders.
"I wasn't even thinking about this two weeks ago," said Steve Richards, founder of Acroname Inc. Yet later this week, the Boulder company will ship its first $259 - $299 Palm Pilot Robot kits to customers.
Under the licensure agreement, Reshko will even pocket a little money for his work.
Sitting in the Robotics Education Laboratory in Newell-Simon Hall last week, the thin, quiet Reshko seemed to be taking it all in stride. "The schedule's getting pretty intense," is about as far as he would go in acknowledging the hubbub.
In a way, this level of interest -- commercial interest -- in a little three-wheeled robot that moves around a desktop or floor seems a little misplaced at the Robotics Institute. "There are a lot of robots around here," computer scientist Matt Mason said in a massive understatement. This is, after all, the birthplace of robots that have explored volcanoes, plunged into crippled nuclear reactors, driven cars on freeways, flown helicopters and discovered meteorites in Antarctica.
Yet the Palm Pilot robot is unique and frankly was designed with the hope of capturing people's imagination. Locomotion on its three omni-directional wheels almost seems impossible at first glance, though it turns out to be quite nimble. Controlling the robot with a popular handheld computing device -- 7 million Palm Pilots are in use -- increases its accessibility to the masses and allows users to share programs for controlling the robot among themselves.
"And there's a great deal of luck involved," Mason added.
Reshko himself is an unusual researcher. "He's a remarkable designer and builder of mechanisms," said Mason, who first learned about him through a graduate student who worked with Allderdice's FIRST team, the Steel Dragons. FIRST is a program that teams high school students and professional engineers to build robots for regional and national competition. Reshko had special promise so Mason hired him in the summer of 1999.
Originally from St. Petersburg, Russia, Reshko immigrated to Pittsburgh five years ago with his parents, joining extended family members who already had settled here. They live in Squirrel Hill; his father, Boris, is a computer programmer and his mother, Nina, is an architect. Greg, who has been programming computers since age 8, was always interested in "technical stuff," but had not dabbled in robotics until joining the FIRST team during his sophomore year.
But he proved adept at configuring and building robots. And he is fast. One of Mason's research interests is in rapid prototyping; for that project alone, Reshko designed and built 10 robots in a couple of months.
"He's so fast that I can't keep up with him actually," Mason said.
"In general, if I like something, I put all my energy into it," Reshko explained.
The Palm Pilot robot was done in conjunction with Illah Nourbakhsh, a roboticist who heads the Institute's Toy Robots Initiative. Nourbakhsh had put together a simple robot to prove that a Palm Pilot could be used as a controller. Reshko was given the task of exploring what a robot controlled by a personal data assistant could do and of designing a robot that would both interest hobbyists and be simple enough for them to build themselves.
Mason suggested the use of omni-directional wheels. Depending on the speed and direction of rotation of each of the three wheels, the robot can rotate or move in any direction. In fact it can even rotate as it moves.
In addition to the three wheels, which are evenly spaced around the edge of its round base, the robot has three infrared sensors to help it avoid obstacles or move along walls. All of the parts are off-the-shelf components available in most hobby or electronics shops.
It took Reshko about a month just to write programs for the Palm Pilot to control the robot's odd locomotion. The whole project -- building the robot, writing the programs and developing assembly instructions -- took three months. A Web page that described the project and allowed anyone to download assembly instructions and Palm Pilot programs was created.
At first, the Web page received moderate traffic -- a few thousand hits through the summer. But when slashdot.org posted information about it a month ago, Mason said, the hits jumped to 40,000. When other Web sites, such as wired.com, followed suit, the hits kept rising, and were up to 140,000 as of last week.
Richards, who founded Acroname to help "make robotics easier," maintained the response reflects, in part, a growing interest in robotics. The Palm Pilot robot is particularly appealing, he said, because Palm Pilots are so ubiquitous among the technically minded and because of its unusual design.
"Intuitively, you look at it and you think it can't go anywhere, but actually it moves quite well," Richards said. It also attracts attention. While carrying one of his prototypes through a neighboring engineering firm, he was stopped by at least six engineers who wanted to know what it was."
By the time all of the interest flared, Reshko had moved on to other projects. He spends most of his time now working on the Mobipulator, another project of Mason's that is exploring how desktop robots might be used to do work. They are using the four-wheeled Mobipulator to see how wheels might be used as fingers -- for shuffling papers, for instance.
In the longer term, Reshko is pursuing a computer science degree and giving serious thought to making robotics a career. "It's a very new field, so there's a lot to explore," he said.
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