Jerry Weinberg and William Yu, Associate Professors of Computer Science at Southern Illinois University Edwardsville, in partnership with Kim Wheeler and Robin Knight of RoadNarrows, LLC have received $150,000 grant from the National Science Foundation to create a "Brain Pack" for walking robots. The grant, titled "General Robot Controller for Legged Mobile Robots with Integrated Open Source Software", is to develop a computer backpack or Brain Pack for two-, four-, and six-legged robots for teaching science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) courses. The Brain Pack will provide an easy to program computer controller that connects sensors, such as foot touch sensors to give the robot the feeling of walking and a color camera to give the robot eyesight, to commands for generating movement. It will be a general controller that can be used on any legged robot, providing it with sensors and computing power that walking robots on the market currently do not have.

Hands-on robotics projects have become useful educational tools across a variety of subjects. Robots are integrated systems comprised of interdependent electrical, mechanical, and computational components. Because of their multidisciplinary nature, the study of robotics in the classroom has become a valuable tool for the practical, hands-on application of concepts in various STEM topics at the K-12 and undergraduate educational levels. While there are wheeled robots that are easy to use for K-12 and undergraduate educators, there are not any legged robot platforms with easy to use hardware and software. The Brain Pack will have plug-and-play sensors with straightforward software modules developed specifically for use in the classroom.

SIUE has been using robots in classrooms and outreach programs since 1999. Both Drs. Weinberg and Yu use robotics to teach computer science and engineering courses. In addition Dr. Weinberg conducts middle and high school robot demonstrations, workshops, and competitions to help get students interested in pursuing careers in computer science and engineering. Most recently Dr. Weinberg organized the Greater St. Louis Botball Tournament held on the SIUE campus. This was a regional robotics competition for a national tournament conducted by the KISS Institute for Practical Robotics. The regional tournament brought together about 150 students along with their teachers and parents from 11 schools in Illinois and Missouri. The event stated with a student/teacher workshop on building and programming robots and ended in an exciting head-to-head tournament 7 weeks later. This was the first regional robotics tournament held at SIUE, which Dr. Weinberg plans to make an annual event.

Kim Wheeler-Smith and Robin Knight are the co-founders of RoadNarrows, LCC, which is located in Loveland, Colorado. Their graduate degrees in engineering and mathematics focused on robotics and computational intelligence, which got them interested in creating a company to provide mobile robots to educators and researchers. The primary mission of RoadNarrows is to participate in the robotics revolution by developing, manufacturing, and selling hardware and software platforms to further technical education and to enable related research and development.

The partnership between SIUE and RoadNarrows is key to the successful development of the Brain Pack innovation. The educators as SIUE have considerable experience in developing curricula and software for using robots in the classroom, and RoadNarrows have similarly considerable experience in engineering and marketing robot hardware for educators.