The World Maker Faire has come and gone, but the spirit and purpose of the fair lives on. Heather Knight’s robot Nao performed a series of stand-up sketch comedy bits about NYC neighborhoods, and also helped initiate the world’s first Robot Census! Initially focused on robots on Pittsburgh’s Carnegie Mellon University campus, the census is now expanding its reach — how many robots will you report?
Baby Corvidae saying, “Don’t forget this one!”
Originally expected to track maybe 100 or so bots on CMU’s campus, the bureau reported yesterday on its twitter account — @robotcensus — an astounding 547 robots! Now the census is looking to branch out beyond Pittsburgh. You can download the form (400Kb PDF) to send in or program your robots to fill out their own census here! And we’ll keep you up to date with their findings. I don’t suspect a 1:1 ratio with every human on the planet, but a 1:1 ratio with all the MAKE readers would be pretty rad!
Heather is currently conducting her doctoral research at Carnegie Mellon’s Robotics Institute and running Marilyn Monrobot Labs in NYC, which creates socially intelligent robot performances and sensor-based electronic art.
Her work also includes: robotics and instrumentation at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, interactive installations with Syyn Labs, field applications and sensor design at Aldebaran Robotics, and she is an alumnus from the Personal Robots Group at the MIT Media Lab. She earned her bachelor and masters degrees at MIT in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science and has a minor in Mechanical Engineering.
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