G.I.R.L. Tech.

G.I.R.L. TECH. is the name of my second semester project. It stands for Growing Interest in Robotics and Learning Technology. G.I.R.L. Tech uses robots to intrigue, empower, and inspire. The team of eight graduate students worked closely with the Children's Museum of Pittsburgh, the Girl Scouts of Western Pennsylvania, and the YWCA of Greater Pittsburgh to make robotics accessible to a wider audience. Our aim is to create opportunities for young people, especially girls, to engage with robotics in ways that are relevant to their lives and will help them build a lifelong interest in robotics. I was a designer and programmer for G.I.R.L. Tech as well as mentor to the high school girls in the internship program. You can find a link to the website here.

Photos can be found in my portfolio.

The Begining

Like it says above there were eight of us, two programmers, a 2d artist, a modeler, three mechanical engineers, and a cognitive scientist who was our producer. Together we created a robotic painter for the Children's Museum and hosted a program for high school girls at the ETC. To accomplish this we did a lot of research, planning, and designing.

In the beginning of the semester we spent our time doing research. We were saddled with figuring out something to create for the Children's Museum and how to best accomplish our G.I.R.L. Tech. goal. Together we had ideas for this but no way to back them up. To do this we needed to answer the questions we had from our brainstorming sessions. We talked to many people even went to a toy fair for research. In the end we came up with the robotic painter who is now affectionately named Lynxie and our high school program.

Lynxie's Art Studio

Lynxie's Art Studio is an exhibit aimed at children ages seven and under. There are two parts to the exhibit, a child'sstation and a robot station. The child's station consists of a screen, three color choice buttons, and a stylus. With these tools the child can draw a picture. The robot station is housing for Lynxie. She sits within her plexiglass house and draws on a plexiglass sheet. She has three paint containers that match the color choice buttons on the child's station. The whole exhibit is made out of plexiglass and wood. In the back of the child's station we placed a laptop and all the electronics which can be viewed through the plexiglass.

Internship Program

The high school girls program ended up having nine girls in it. They would come twice a week and spend two and half hours with us. When they visited us we would do activities with them that introduced them to mechanical engineering and programming. On certain days we would have guest speakers talk to the girls or we would go to their place of work. Their websites can be found here:

CMU Motion Capture Lab at the CMU Graphics Lab
National Robotics Engineering Center
Mechanimals
BeatBots
Bossa Nova Concepts

For the girl's final project in the program they created tic-tac-toe playing robots. These robots were built with the expert Bioloids kit. They used inverse kinematics to program the robots they built to place spots on a board built by the mechanical engineers and then draw a line connecting the three winning dots. The program used a command line interface to take the data from the players. The program could have two human players or you could play against the computer. It also had the ability to let the two robots to play themselves if you wished to just watch them move.