"Red" Whittaker: A Man And His Robots

[Rohith Surampudi]

Heres an interesting story from business week magazine

"Red" Whittaker: A Man And His Robots (http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/06_26/b3990034.htm)

and heres the slide show

Slide show (http://images.businessweek.com/ss/06/06/reds_robots/index_01.htm)

this is really cool, at least to me...i wonder if he knows about FIRST.

[dlavery]

Heres an interesting story from business week magazine

"Red" Whittaker: A Man And His Robots (http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/06_26/b3990034.htm)

and heres the slide show

Slide show (http://images.businessweek.com/ss/06/06/reds_robots/index_01.htm)

this is really cool, at least to me...i wonder if he knows about FIRST.

Yes, he does. Red and some of the students from the Field Robotics Center supported one of the early FIRST teams (in '94 or '95, if I recall correctly). Then later, several of his students supported Team 117 in '97-'99. Two of the students from Red's lab that worked with Team 117 were Mike Montemerlo and Mark Maimone. Mike went on to become the lead software engineer for the Stanford University DARPA Grand Challenge team (http://www-cs.stanford.edu/group/roadrunner/team.html), which won the $2 million prize with their robot "Stanley (http://www.popularmechanics.com/science/robotics/2169012.html)." Mark is now one of the lead systems engineers for the Mars Exploration Program office at the NASA Jet Propulsion Lab, and is currently working on designs for the Mars Science Lab (http://marsprogram.jpl.nasa.gov/msl/overview/) project. In the mean time, Red and his lab continue to knock out some of the coolest robots in the world on a regular basis. The CMU Robotics Institute (http://www.ri.cmu.edu/) is the robotics community's equivalent of Mecca.

-dave