Robotics

Department Head: Sara Sprenkle sprenkles@wlu.edu
Department Administrator: Carolyn Wingrove-Moore wingrove-moorec@wlu.edu
Mailing Address: Department of Computer Science Washington and Lee University Lexington, Virginia 24450 540-458-8151

Computer Science students have the opportunity to work with robots at all levels of their educational experience. The Department's robot pool expands with student interest. It currently includes

The popular Lego Mindstorms NXT robot kits (sixteen kits), supporting a wide variety of wheeled and legged robot projects
The more advanced, pre-assembled Khepera II platform (three robots and two grippers), supporting more complex research experiments
Two iRobot Create robots, equipped with our laptop-based visual client/server camera system
Four AR.Drone flying robots (debuted at the 2010 Spring Term Fair)
An Aeroquad drone built around the Arduino microcontroller, for advanced sensing / navigation projects.
A Surveyor SRV-1 Blackin WiFi camera with pan-tilt servo control.

An exciting new feature of these robots is the ability to control them over WiFi from mobile smartphone platforms like the iPhone (iPad / iPod Touch) . Our students use robots in a growing variety of contexts, including freshman seminars, elective courses for the major, and honors thesis and R.E. Lee scholarship projects.