MOFFETT FIELD, CA—Thirty San Francisco Bay Area high school students entering their senior year this fall participated in a new robotics summer course offered by Carnegie Mellon University at its West Coast campus at Moffett Field. The course was offered in collaboration with NASA’s Ames Research Center and the National Hispanic University in San Jose, CA. This was Carnegie Mellon’s first outreach program at the NASA research park.

Students in the Robotic Autonomy program built, programmed and operated their own vision-based, mobile robots as they learned about the electronics, mechanics and computer science of robotic systems. The college-level class ended with an autonomous robot contest.

The 7-week course was taught by Illah Nourbakhsh, assistant professor of robotics at Carnegie Mellon’s Robotics Institute in Pittsburgh.