PSU INTELLIGENT ROBOTICS LABORATORY: NEWS FOR YEAR 2004

1. Winter quarter Intelligent Robotics class and RAS students start building robots for Hahoe KAIST Robot Theatre on $40,000 grant from KAIST to build an interactive robot theatre performing the traditional mask dance play of Hahoe.
   
   
2. January. HEXOR robot is purchased from Stenzel Company in Gliwice, Poland. This is a very nicely designed walking robot, a hexapod, built of steel, with several sensors, sonars, and a camera. We add two claws and software in a class project that continues through two quarters.
   
   
3. January Professor Perkowski participates in Washington D.C. in NSF panel on biomedical research.
   
   
4. January Professor Perkowski is elected chair of IEEE Computer Society Technical Committee on Multiple-Valued Logic.
   
   
5. Winter term Several students visit high schools to present lectures about robotics and education at PSU.
   
   
6. Spring term Our robots are demonstrated to Intel's ISEF, PDXBOT'04 and several other demos. Big group of high school student inventors and robot builders visit the labs. The new demo of the industrial robot is shown for the first time to the public.
   
   
7. Summer term We have a group of high school students who work on the stage design for the theatre and on large humanoid face from aluminum with Kyle Reid.
   
   
8. Summer term Professor Perkowski with two students, Jake Biamonte and Jeff Allen work in KAIST, Korea, on Hahoe KAIST Robot Theatre. The early version of the theatre was demonstrated on August 28 in KAIST. The robots are: Kyung Jin Lee - an interactive latex face robot of a young woman (designed by Jeff and Jake), Sonbi - a Confucian Scholar, a wooden mask robot (designed by several class students, especially Stefan Gebauer), and Paekchong - Butcher, a wooden mask robot (designed by Kyle Reid). These robots perform the last act of the Hahoe play.
   
   
9. Summer term We start a collaboration with Prof. Dong-Hwa Kim from Hanbat University in Daejeon, Korea on quantum immunological control of humanoid robots. Dr. Perkowski visited several labs at the Technical University of Warsaw to start a collaboration in the area of intelligent and humanoid robotics.
   
   
10. Fall term Martin Lukac completed the two-robot theater of talking lion and tiger (first act of Hahoe play). A demo of presidential debate between them is set up to be shown this quarter. A stage is build by Jake and Martin for this theatre in the laboratory. Jeff Allen works on mobile robot with humanoid body - a latex mask woman actor for several plays, being an improvement to the Kyung Jin Lee robot.