Palm Pilot Robot

"The Palm Pilot Robot was created to enable just about anyone to start building and programming mobile robots at a modest cost," said Illah Nourbakhsh, assistant professor of robotics and head of the institute's Toy Robots Initiative. "The Palm makes a handy robot controller. It packs a lot of computational power in a small size, runs on batteries, and best of all, can display graphics and an interactive user interface."

Robotic elements built into the base on which the Palm sits empower it to move about on flat surfaces and sense its nearby surroundings. The base is equipped with three "omni-wheels" with independent control of rotation that allow movement in any direction. The base also incorporates three optical range sensors, enabling the palm robot to "see" the world up to about a meter away and sense nearby obstacles and walls.

Nourbakhsh collaborated on the development of the Palm Pilot Robot with Computer Science Professor Matthew T. Mason and his laboratory assistant, Grigoriy Reshko, a freshman in Carnegie Mellon's School of Computer Science. The project grew out of earlier work in Mason's Manipulation Laboratory where he and Reshko were developing easy and inexpensive rapid prototyping of small robots using simple construction techniques and plastic gear motors