WHAT: On Thursday the USC Viterbi School of Engineering will open its doors and welcome the public to
see and interact with its collection of robots.
WHEN: 10 a.m. to 4 p.m., Thursday, April 12, 2012
WHERE: Ronald Tutor Hall, 4th Floor
Hedco Neuroscience Building, Room HNB 10
University of Southern California
(Enter through Gate 6 on Vermont Ave.)
Organized by the USC Center for Robotics and Embedded Systems (CRES), the event will feature a host of different machines, including robot wheelchairs, nanorobots, underwater robots, flying robots, robotic arms, reconfigurable “super robots,” and social and humanoid robots, both small and large. The open house also celebrates the third annual National Robotics Week, a nationwide initiative aimed at increasing public awareness of the growing importance of “robo-technology” and its future social and cultural impact.
USC is the largest center of robotics research in Southern California and boasts the most state-of-the-art equipment for human-centered robotics in the nation. USC professors and students alike are internationally renowned for their robotics work focusing on societally relevant problems, including those in health and the environment. Just last week, a USC-partnered team was granted $10 million dollars by the National Science Foundation (one of the organization’s largest prizes) to build “socially assistive robots,” a termed coined at USC.
Established in 2002, CRES serves as a lynchpin for strategic robotics research at USC. CRES seeks to integrate and promote excellence in USC’s broad robotics research, facilitate interdisciplinary collaboration, improve robotics education integrate robotics into education, and get robotics out of the lab and into society.
This press release is available on the USC Press Room website.
About USC Viterbi: Engineering Studies began at the University of Southern California in 1905. Nearly a century later, the Viterbi School of Engineering received a naming gift in 2004 from alumnus Andrew J. Viterbi, inventor of the Viterbi algorithm now key to cell phone technology and numerous data applications. Consistently ranked among the top graduate programs in the world, the school enrolls more than 2,100 undergraduate students and 4,200 graduate students, taught by 168 tenured and tenure-track faculty, with 50 endowed chairs and professorships. For more information, visit viterbi.usc.edu.
