SANTA CLARA, California -- "Oh, boy, look at that robot!"
That may have been the most common refrain of the day Friday among the more than 1,200 kids at RoboNexus, a robotics conference held this week at the Santa Clara Convention Center.
"It's all about engineering, and thinking outside the box," said David Waters, a member of Danville, California's Monte Vista High School robot team at RoboNexus. "Building a robot is one of the funnest things you'll ever do."
Not everyone at RoboNexus was under 18. Many serious designers were in attendance, most to exhibit work that often has a military utility. Yet, for some adults in the hall Friday, the best part of the event was watching kids get excited.
"I think it's great, because it shows you the other side, the side that the public never sees about what gets kids jazzed up if they have the opportunity and have the right kind of guidance from adults," said Dean Kamen, the inventor of the much-hyped Segway scooter. "Somebody's got to be out there showing kids that there's things in life that are exciting and that they should be putting their passion into."
iRobot was on hand to demonstrate its Swarm series of robots, a group of small machines designed to intelligently discover each other and adapt to changing environments. They're designed, the company said, to know how to follow each other, split autonomously into groups and figure out how to make a circle around their leader.
One of the most ambitious projects in the room was a robot vehicle called eXpeditor, by a team called The Prodigies.
According to the team's captain, 15-year-old Nicholas Hoza, eXpeditor is designed to enter the Darpa Challenge, a robot road race across barren Southern California desert that no one completed in its first iteration this year.
"We're building our system from the ground up specifically for this purpose, while some other teams are modifying vehicles or software," Hoza said. "I like challenges. It's fun to work on solving problems that no one's done before."
