HU Joins Alliance to Increase HBCU Research and Education in Robotics

Hampton, VA - Hampton University recently received a $92,000 grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF) to enhance the robotics programs for undergraduate students and to create outreach events for local K-12 students. The award is a part of a $2 million grant awarded to the Advancing Robotics Technology for Societal Impact (ARTSI) Alliance, a collaboration of institutions including eight Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCU) and seven Carnegie Research I Institutions.

The ARTSI Alliance, which is led by Spelman College, is a collaboration of schools with the main goal of increasing the amount of African Americans who study computer sciences and robotics in college. The alliance also works to encourage K-12 students in robotics through different community outreach activities.

In the summer of 2009, HU will host the ARTSI Alliance Conference. Dr. Chutima Boonthum, assistant professor with the HU Department of Computer Sciences, is the principal investigator of the grant here at HU. She is currently planning for a conference that will involve sessions and workshops that will show the technology behind robotics.

“Robotics are state of the art technology,” stated Boonthum. “Just like the satellites and proton beam therapy, HU continues to be a part of state-of-the-art research.

“The class started by becoming familiar with how to build the robots,” stated Boonthum. “Since building the robots, the students have written programs that instruct the robots to do different task. One of the robots plays the piano.” Currently, students in the Intro to Robotics course at HU are working with legos to create robots to perform different tasks.

Boonthum and her students intend on recruiting younger students to the field of robotics by visiting local high schools and sharing their robots with them.

Boonthum will join other members of the ARTSI Alliance on Martin Luther King Jr., Day, Jan. 14, to kickoff the alliance. The kickoff meeting, held at the NSF in Arlington Va., will feature Dr. Andrew B. Williams, an assistant professor at Spelman and the lead PI of the ARTSI Alliance.

Boonthum hopes that the efforts of the ARTSI Alliance will cause other universities to join the alliance resulting in an increase of African American students who are interested in computer science and robotics.