[sarienbarry]

The Virtual Robotics lab gives users the opportunity to work in a robotics lab building and programing a mobile robot. The tasks include: assembling all physical components of the robot, building a robotic arm, writing scripts to direct the arm to pick up a Coke bottle, writing scripts to steer the robot's wheels to the activity table, loading "beliefs" into the main AI engine (ProtoThinker), and finally watching the Iris.4 robot move through the lab, pick up the Coke bottle, and put it into the recycler (an action it performs because in its "language of thought," it is a committed environmentalist).

The robot that you build in this lab is a "top-down" robot. That is, the robot's behavior will be controlled by a good 'ole fashioned artificial intelligence program (GOFAI) which is capable of having "beliefs" about the world, of making logical inferences, and is the single, centralized control device. This is in contrast to robots with a "bottom-up" design, like the IRRL Virtual Robot, also featured on our website.

The Iris.4 Robot that users construct in the virtual lab is a direct model of the physical Iris.4 robot built by a team of undergraduates at Illinois State University and their partners at the Technical University of Lisbon, Portugal. The Mind Project's Iris.4 Mobile Robot Group will consider proposals from other teams who would like to add some new capability to our robot or to improve on an existing capability. Each team should have one or more student-researchers and at least one instructor to serve as an advisor. Extensive documentation is available (below) showing how the real Iris robots have been built.