A handful of small, boxy robots scurried across the floor in a row, their red, blue and green lights blinking. Suddenly they broke into song—“Hi ho, hi ho. It’s off to work we go”—and then scattered in all directions.
“It was robotics research the likes of which I’d never seen before,” said Colin Angle, CEO of iRobot, the Burlington company with which McLurkin conducted the DARPA research. “Creating a programming language for more than 100 robots, an ecology of small robots, there were a number of little challenges James was taking on, all of them very cool.”
Boston News via SmartMobs
This “swarm” of simple robots are James McLurkin’s contribution to cutting-edge robotics. McLurkin, a PhD candidate at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, said his computer programming can save lives, time and money by teaching dozens of small robots to clear land mines or explore the surface of Mars, for instance.
“The field is very new, and what I’ve been doing is creating a toolbox of behaviors,” said McLurkin, 32, who works among the odd angles and slopes of MIT’s new Stata Center. “I’m looking for insights on how simple robots can get together and do very complex tasks.”
In 2003, McLurkin won the prestigious Lemelson-MIT Student Prize for inventiveness, and took his robots to a Virginia military base to put them through their paces for the Army’s research and development wing, DARPA.
“It was robotics research the likes of which I’d never seen before,” said Colin Angle, CEO of iRobot, the Burlington company with which McLurkin conducted the DARPA research. “Creating a programming language for more than 100 robots, an ecology of small robots, there were a number of little challenges James was taking on, all of them very cool.”
Tonight, McLurkin and his mini-robots will be featured in the debut of the new public television show, “NOVA ScienceNOW.”
McLurkin grew up on Long Island in New York where he said he was something of a troublemaker in school, often bored by learning only through books and lectures. McLurkin preferred hands-on learning, experimenting, trial and error. As a child, he built with Legos and erector sets, added gears to his BMX dirt bike, and copied basic programs into his Atari 800XL. He has been building robots since high school when he programmed a remote-control car, armed with a water pistol, to seek out and soak his parents.
“I am not a theoretician,” he said about his undergraduate years at MIT. “As critical as math and proofs were, without connecting it to something I could get my hands on, I struggled. Even if I could understand the math, I could not place it in my structure of knowledge. And if you don’t know where to put something, you’ll lose it.”
McLurkin brings this tactile understanding to his work as an instructor at MIT’s SEED program, a weekend math and science enrichment class for Boston and Cambridge public high-school students. In a recent computer-science course, for example, he used a deck of cards to demonstrate a “binary search algorithm” used to help computers sort through vast amounts of data.
“James’ teaching style is very kinetic and exciting to the kids,” said Nicole Stark, SEED’s program coordinator. “These are often not kids who are engaged by blackboard learning. It’s really liberating to a lot of them.”
In addition to teaching high-school students, pursuing his PhD and working in the robotics lab, McLurkin is also a teaching assistant for MIT undergraduate courses, an attentive steward of his ant farm, a motorcycle enthusiast, and an avid video-game player. It makes for a busy schedule, which McLurkin approaches like an industrial engineer. On tonight’s television segment, McLurkin reveals how he manages to wash his laundry only once every six weeks—it involves a lot of underwear and T-shirts—and his algorithm for finding true love.
Time management became a serious issue for McLurkin as a sophomore at MIT when he began to struggle academically and took a hard look at how he spent his days.
“It shocked me how much time I was wasting,” he said. Some of the keys to efficiency are avoiding mistakes (like leaving the keys to the robotics lab back at his apartment) and giving tasks enough time for their completion in order to minimize the time spent stopping one task and starting another. McLurkin calls this “context switching,” a computer-science term he has borrowed for his daily life.
“Your computer has various applications running, but you only have one processor. So there’s a lot of saving and loading time,” he explained.
McLurkin believes all this time management will help him achieve what he calls a “life goal” - developing a programming language that would allow the swarm of robots to figure out by themselves how to break a complicated task into small pieces each completed by a group of robots.
“I want to stay in academia,” he said, “and build the world’s coolest robots.”- begin ajax random post data Loading…->
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