VASC Seminar Announcement
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Date: Monday, 4/5/99
Time: 3:30-4:30
Place: Smith Hall 2nd Floor Common Area

Speaker:  Illah Nourbakhsh
          CMU Robotics Institute
          http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~illah


Title: The Toy Robotics Initiative

Abstract:

About 6 months ago, Ben Brown and I started the Toy Robotics Initiative 
with the support and advise of Takeo Kanade.  To date, the TRI has already 
licensed two robot products to outside companies, which are in the process 
of attempting to commercialize the products.  In this non-technical talk, 
I will start by describing the purpose of the TRI and the strategy we have 
been employing to accomplish our objectives. Then I will talk about three 
groups of ideas that are at various stages of development: insect 
telepresence; plant cyborgs; quasi-biomimetic locomotion.  I hope to provide 
a hands-on demonstration of the insect telepresence robot.