Robots to the rescue! Automating search and rescue

That’s the future students at the Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS) are learning to design in “CS286: Multi-Robot Systems – Control, Communication, and Security.”

“Search and rescue pushes the envelope in terms of what we can do with robots and puts them in challenging situations, and it’s also a problem of great societal importance,” said Stephanie Gil, Assistant Professor of Computer Science at SEAS.

In CS286, Gil splits the students into teams. Each group is given a robot to work with provided by the Active Learning Lab.

Weekly workshops, known as “mini-hacks,” give students the opportunity to master the robot’s algorithms and operating system, and see their reading assignments in action. The final mini-hack took place on 25 March in the Science and Engineering Complex. Students mapped a test environment with their robots’ on-board cameras and sensors, then used that map to remotely navigate the robots around simulated obstacles – cones, blocks and partitions.

“Throughout the weeks you just get better at coding with the robot and controlling it, and it equips us with what we need to do the final project,” said Jun Chong, a third-year electrical engineering student with a secondary in computer science.
Many of the students in CS286 began the semester with little to no prior knowledge of robotics.

“The first mini-hack, I thought there was so much about the robot that I hadn’t learned before,” said Maegan Jong, a second-year student concentrating in CS. “But with that challenging introduction, it’s helped us gradually set up for the final project. Right now, I have much more familiarity with the system, and I do like how it’s very hands-on.”

The experience of a gradual accumulation of knowledge through the semester is exactly what she intends.

“For a lot of students, this was the first time they ever worked with robots,” she said. “We’ve made every mini-hack incremental, so it builds upon the previous one, and it teaches a new skill each time. My hope in the design of the course is that at the end of each mini-hack, they walk away feeling like they learned something new, and they feel more confident in their abilities with the robots.”