Notre Dame Robotics Featured In James Patterson’s Latest Book
Prolific bestselling author James Patterson released a new children’s book on Nov. 24, and it has a distinct University of Notre Dame feel.
House of Robots, co-written by Patterson and Chris Grabenstein, takes place in South Bend and features illustrations from the University’s annual National Robotics Week event and robotic football tournament. It tells the story of a boy whose college professor mother invents robots, and what happens when one of those robots decides to enroll in school with his flesh-and-blood “brother.”
While robot siblings may be fictional, cutting edge research at Notre Dame is bringing us closer to the day that robots can serve as teammates and helpers in complex human environments. In combination with the University’s robotics outreach programs, this makes Notre Dame an apt setting for a book that aims to get students interested in robotics and STEM.
Laurel Riek, Clare Booth Luce Assistant Professor of Computer Science and Engineering, does research with the goal of creating robotics technology that can automatically sense, understand and respond to human behavior. “The purpose behind this is to make new things possible for the humans in the loop: for instance, to save lives by improving patient safety; to give an aging population the independence they need to continue living where and as they please; and to enable people with disabilities,” Riek said.
“Personal robots that work side-by-side with people are forecasted to be the next big technological revolution,” Riek said. “We are slowly seeing them entering our lives: aiding people with disabilities and older adults, performing onerous chores, and soon transporting us from place to place. However, there remains a gap between intelligent systems that work in the lab, and the reality of building systems that work for real people in the real world. We are working to bridge this gap, particularly in the areas of social sensing and behavior synthesis. We are creating robots that can automatically understand what people are doing, and use that understanding to work more effectively with people across all kinds of different settings.”
On a project funded by a National Science Foundation Early CAREER award, Riek is improving the state of the art for the most-used category of android robots in the world today: human-patient simulators. These robots are an important tool for training clinicians, but current systems are missing a key feature: Despite the critical importance of facial cues in diagnosis and effective communication, none of the commercially available simulators have expressive faces.
Riek’s work involves designing new kinds of high-fidelity robotic patient stimulator systems that can express patient signals of pain, stroke and neurological impairment. “This work will enable hundreds of thousands of doctors, nurses, EMTs, firefighters, and combat medics to practice their treatment and diagnostic skills extensively and safely on robots before treating real patients,” she said.
On another project, Riek and her students are deploying novel sensing systems in hospitals to study how teams of clinicians work together and model when and how medical errors occur. They hope that one day this technology will enable healthcare teams to intervene when an error happens.
Riek, who was recently named one of the American Society for Engineering Education’s (ASEE) 20 Faculty Under 40, has also been instrumental in developing and enhancing robotics courses. She designed a new course at Notre Dame called “Autonomous Mobile Robots,” which she has taught for the past four years. It is a joint upper-level undergraduate / graduate class that features a hands-on approach to learning.
From her own experience, Riek knows that books about science and technology can have a formative impact on young readers.
“I grew up reading science fiction and adventure novels, authors such as William Sleator, Harriet Adams, and Issac Asimov,” she said. “When I was 15 I had a job at the local library in my town. During breaks, I would sit in the stacks and read. My town’s library was amazing – it had classic AI books by Roger Penrose and Marvin Minsky, and pop science CS books by Steven Levy. I devoured them. I would come home from work and sit down with a notebook, designing algorithms for intelligent systems. I also loved programming; it just made so much sense to me. In retrospect, it never even occurred to me I could do anything else other than become a computer scientist.”
*This release has been edited for length. To view the full article, visit news.nd.edu