Announcing the Public Robotics Lab at Artisan's Asylum

[Gui Cavalcanti]

Hello everyone!

I'm emailing you to let you know that Artisan's Asylum is starting up what we're calling the Public Robotics Lab - a community of people who are dedicated to learning about and practicing robotics in an open-source way, outside of an academic or corporate setting. The ultimate goal of the effort is to reproduce the graduate lab culture of robotics research (where individual researchers constantly share ideas, feedback, and expertise, while working on different projects) in a public setting, and providing people access to components and equipment they might not get to have access to otherwise.

The effort was kicked off by realizing that Artisan's Asylum still owns a number of pieces of robotic equipment, left over from both the Robotics Intensive class and the Design Challenges we've run. Currently, those pieces of equipment (both in the form of complete robot bases and individual components) are lying fallow and unused, which is a shame. A group of students from the original Robotics Intensive were interested in continuing to develop the robot base as a different robot (specifically as a testbed for autonomy and sensor development), and we needed to figure out a way to make that possible. Thus, we've come up with the Public Robotics Lab.

The lab will consist of a couple of key ideas:

• Some amount of dedicated working and robot storage space in the Robotics Coworking Area at Artisan's Asylum
• Recurring work sessions (or "office hours") when members of the lab can come in and have guaranteed company and available expertise
• Publicly available tools (from hand tools to 3D printers to lasercutters), provided by each member of the lab maintaining a membership to Artisan's Asylum
  
• Public hardware and pre-existing robots available to experiment with to develop interesting robots, control algorithms, or mechanical devices (that remain public Asylum property)
  
• A mailing list and a Facebook group to coordinate development efforts
• Shared github, GrabCAD, and networked storage drives to save pertinent information
• A public webpage (at some point, if this takes off) to present information

The first robot project will be led by Richard Klancer, a former student in the Robotics Intensive class, and will seek to develop the stable robot base made in class (which was intended to carry a vending machine) into a hackable autonomous robot platform. The idea would then be that anyone in the community could program autonomous path-finding algorithms on the robot, so that it could explore the space.

This idea is in its infancy, and the kinks will be worked out over the next few months. If you have an interest in participating (or even just watching it take shape), I encourage you to do the following:

• Join the Facebook group here: https://www.facebook.com/groups/151784211628827
  
• Join the mailing list here: http://artisansasylum.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/public-robotics
  
• Come to the Robot Design Meetup at Artisan's Asylum tomorrow at 7:30: https://www.facebook.com/events/106227219529791
• If you have any old hardware components you'd love to see used for something other than collecting dust, and wouldn't mind people tinkering around with them while you don't have a use for them, we could certainly use donations!

Thanks all. Let me know if you have any questions!

-- 
Gui Cavalcanti, President
Artisan's Asylum, Inc.
http://www.artisansasylum.com
Cell: (857) 389-7669