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St. Charles welcomes ‘Rockin’ Robots’
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Neighbors | Sarah Foor .Carnegie Science Center staff educator Michaela Williams (left) introduced St. Charles students to Quasi the robot (right) during a presentation at the school on Jan. 31.
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Neighbors | Sarah Foor .The "Rockin' Robots" presentation at St. Charles on Jan. 31 explored how robots like the DaVinci droid help make life easier. The DaVinci can perform tele-surgery, where a doctor can control a robot during surgery from many miles away. During a exploration of the DaVinci's work, Mia Lewis (left) acted as the robot, with Callan Herberger (right) as the patient in the tele-surgery.
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Neighbors | Sarah Foor .During her presentation on "Rockin' Robots," Carnegie Science Center staff educator Michaela Williams (right) introduced different kinds of robots and how they help humans. With the help of Grace Kennedy (left), Williams explored the DaVinci droid, a robot that performs tele-surgery. During the experiment, Kennedy acted as the doctor controlling the DaVinci with her voice commands.
By SARAH FOOR
A friendly robot from the Carnegie Science Museum named Quasi, along with his handler, Michaela Williams, visited St. Charles School on Jan. 31 to explore the feats of “Rockin’ Robots” that explore land, sea and space.
Quasi, one of just three animatronic puppet hybrid robots in the world, was designed with features meant to mimic human patterns of movement and communication.
Because Quasi himself was considered a “rockin’ robot,” Williams used him to teach that a true robot must sense, think, act and interact. Williams noted that for humans to communicate with robots, they use a language called binary code that is a long series of zeros and ones.
“The next time your use your cell phone or computer, think about all of the amazing things that they are accomplishing by using zeroes and ones at their most basic level. It’s actually quite amazing,” Williams said.
Quasi introduced videos to the students showing robots like the DaVinci droid, which can perform telesurgery, with the physician controlling the droid able to be hundreds of miles away.
From there, Quasi introduced the Mars Rover, a robot that explores and collects samples on Mars, and Jason, an undersea robot that can travel many miles down into Earth’s oceans. While meeting the helpful robots, St. Charles students participated in hands-on demonstrations that further explained how each machine worked.
Williams said the friendly design of Quasi is meant to invite students to participate.
“The fun in Quasi is his interactive nature and how our program gets kids to show off what they can do. We want to educate the kids and inspire them to explore further. The world of robotics has so much for the students to look into if they choose to go in that direction,” Williams noted.