PSU INTELLIGENT ROBOTICS LABORATORY: NEWS FOR YEAR 2000

1. Thanks to efforts of Interim Chair Doug Hall we obtained an extended space for our laboratory in FAB. The Intelligent Robotics laboratory includes now the main room, the Virtual Reality Annex, the mechanical workshop and the storage area. Additional area for storage has been acquired in PCAT and SEAS building to store our collection of ancient computers and components for re-use.
   In addition, the Industrial Robotics Laboratory in PCAT 30 includes space for industrial robots and undergraduate robotics experiments. New space for large industrial robots will be soon acquired in PCAT.
   
   
2. Professor Garrison Greenwood is an Associate Editor of IEEE Transactions on Neural Networks.
   
   
3. Professor Garrison Greenwood is an Associate Editor of IEEE Transactions on Evolutionary Computation.
   
   
4. Professor Martin Zwick (Artificial Life, Reconstructurability Analysis, Cybernetics, General Systems Theory) joins our lab.
   
   
5. Our proposal for joint research with Technical University of Freiberg (Professor Bernd Steinbach) in the area of decompositional methods for data mining has been funded by NSF and DAAD. As the result of this grant Professor Steinbach spend one months in Portland working with Dr. Alan Mishchenko on bi-decomposition applied to data mining.
   
   
6. New equipment donations from Tektronix, Summit and Xilinx. ADEPT ONE robot donated with complete cell.
   
   
7. Professor Perkowski is a general Chair of ISMVL symposium in Portland, Oregon, May 2000. Several international researchers visit our laboratory.
   
   
8. Dr. Mishchenko is a Chair of Third Oregon Symposium on Logic, Design and Learning in Portland, Oregon, May 2000.
   
   
9. New classes are taught: Professor Greenwood teaches "Evolutionary Computing" and Professor McNames teaches "Learning from Data".
   
   
10. Spider robot seems to be the most liked robot in the lab.
    
    
11. Many other new kits arrived and have been assembled.
    
    
12. The ``Electric Horse'' group of educators and engineers who plan to build a robotic horse to walk the Rose Festival parade in Portland has been formed, with Professor Perkowski as one of participants. The first group of high school students worked in lab during the Spring quarter.
    
    
13. The PSU ROBO-CLUB (IEEE Robotics and Automation student section, Oregon) has been formally established with Bryce Tucker as president. We are a group of faculty, graduate and undergraduate students, and high school students dedicated to build a society of small mobile robots and puppets that will be controlled and observable through the Internet. Everybody in Portland area is invited to join our Friday 5pm meetings in person and our lab remotely by Internet.
    
    
14. The common laboratory for Electrical Engineering and Mechanical Engineering has been established. Professor Chien Wern joined the lab together with his 4 Seiko robots. New room, PCAT 30, has been added to the laboratory, to keep all heavy industrial robots. It will host also the Adept Robot ($150,000) donated by Tektronix.
    
    
15. We obtained grant from PSU Provost to purchase PEOPLEBOT mobile robot.
    
    
16. We obtained $5000 grant for high school robotics.
    
    
17. The new scara-type robot arm has been transferred from Dr. Lendaris room to robotics lab.
    
    
18. The Laboratory organized a successful International Symposium on Multiple-Valued Logic and Third Oregon Symposium on Logic, Design and Learning. Prof. Marek Perkowski was the Chair of ISMVL, Dr. Alan Mishchenko the chair of LDL, Prof. Malgorzata Chrzanowska-Jeske was the Financial Chair of ISMVL, Prof. Xiaoyu Song was the Publication Chair of ISMVL, and Prof. Robert Daasch was the Local Arrangement Chair of ISMVL. Several papers written by Lab researchers were presented.
    
    
19. We made a trip to Mount Saint Helen. This will be the traditional event of the lab.
    
    
20. We celebrated the successful Ph.D. thesis defence of Craig Files on Friday, June 9th. Craig got the best Ph.D. student award as well. High school students and teachers, undergraduates and grad students and professors ate pizza and salads (thanks, Karen) and drank soft drinks. Celebrating together Ph.D. thesis defenses will be another new tradition of our laboratory.
    
    
21. We decided that the Logic, Design and Learning Symposium will be organized every odd year in Oregon and every even year in Freiberg, Germany. An international program committee has been formed. It will be the bi-yearly external event of the lab, used also to present our work to other researchers. Some well-known experts join the organization committee.
    
    
22. The second group of high school students worked in lab during Summer quarter on the Electric Horse project.
23. The third group of high school students worked in lab during Fall quarter on the Electric Horse project.
    
    
24. Professor Perkowski and Professor Bruce Schafer taught a short robotics course with hands-on laboratory for high school teachers.
    
    
25. Dr. Alan Mishchenko obtained $ 30,000 grant from Intel to work on advanced ESOP/SOP multi-level logic synthesis.
    
    
26. Saturday Academy student, Nathan Matsuda, selected on a very competitive basis, build several robots in the laboratory in Summer.
    
    
27. Two new high school students will work for the whole year in the laboratory.
    
    
28. Professor Perkowski has been invited to present papers and to organizational committees of several conferences around the world.
    
    
29. Professor Hugo De Garis from from StarLab in Brussels, Belgium, joins the lab as an affiliate member. He is the inventor of Evolvable Hardware and designer (with Dr. Korkin) of the first FPGA-based supercomputer for Evolvable Hardware ideas realization.
    
    
30. Dr. Andrzej Buller from StarLab (Brussels, Belgium) and ATR (Kyoto, Japan) joins the lab as an affiliate member. He is an expert in "brain building" a new approach to use Field Programmable Gate Arrays to simulate reconfigurable Artificial Neural Nets realizing complex architectures.