A baby seal that calms people who touch it...a rover that carries out rescue missions through fire or after an earthquake...a mechanical arm controlled by the thoughts of an injured human...What do these have in common? They're all robots with potential for helping people.
This summer, helping robots and other new advances in robotics will rivet audiences' attention in exhibits like Robot Revolution at Chicago's Museum of Science+Industry. There you can control an all-terrain crawling robot, and feel a therapeutic baby seal robot react to your touch. In Robots Rising! at the Longmont Museum in Longmont, CO, you can drive a robotic rover through a disaster scene, and talk in English or Spanish with a robot that has moving facial features. In The Robot Zoo at the U.S. Space & Rocket Center in Huntsville, Alabama, robots can even help you explore the animal world, through the biomechanics of robotic animals which show such amazing processes as how a chameleon changes color.
Wherever you spend the summer, you can try even more robot explorations with Howtosmile.org activities. In Exploring How Robots Move, learn how pneumatics and hydraulics could be used to produce movement in a robotic arm. In Build Your Own Robotic Arm, develop a robot arm using common materials, by exploring design, construction, and materials selection and use. In How to Train Your Robot, investigate how robots complete a task, write algorithms, and learn how programming errors, known as bugs, cause problems. In Lego Robots, design, build and program a LEGO robot to perform specific tasks, then test, change and retest features of the design to maximize their performance.