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St. Bonaventure University has received a grant from the George I. Alden Trust in Worcester, Mass., that will enable the Computer Science Department to purchase a PeopleBot robot, a robot designed to interact with humans. Dr. Robert Harlan, head of St. Bonaventure’s Undergraduate Robotics Laboratory and co-author of the grant, said the four foot tall robot will enable him to combine two lines of his research — his work in artificial intelligence involving the design of planning systems that can understand commands in English and carry them out in a simulated world, and his work in robotics involving developing software that will enable a robot to function in the real world.
Harlan said much of the coding for programs controlling the robot’s behavior, planning and reasoning will be developed by computer science undergraduates.
“It will provide them with a platform for developing real-time, mission-critical software,” he said, adding that students in other disciplines will be able to design and conduct experiments on how humans interact with the robot.
The robot will enable Dr. Anne Foerst, a theologian and member of the Department of Computer Science, to continue her experimentation with human-robot interaction begun at the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Foerst, co-author of the grant and an internationally known expert on human-robot interaction, is the author of “God in the Machine,” a book that examines what robots can teach us about being human.
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