Robot Reviews

Robotics guru James McLurkin will deliver a lecture on robotics at Eastern Kentucky University's Wallace Building, in the Clark Room on Nov. 5 as part of the university's ongoing Chautauqua Lecture Series entitled "Creative Inquiries".

McLurkin, who once served for 5 years as iRobot Corp's Lead Research Scientist, is now a research associate at the University of Washington. His lecture, aptly named "The End of the World and Other Misconceptions: The Truth About Robotics", will tackle a wide range of topics regarding robotics ranging from misconceptions in pop culture, and the current state and directions of the technology.

In his stint at iRobot that started in 1999, McLurkin worked with over a hundred 4-inch-high titanium machines that communicated with each other. He envisioned having a swarm of robots conduct exploration missions on Mars. 

The advantage of having smaller units that belonged to a big group was that if one or two got damaged, the mission wouldn't be compromised as the rest could easily fill in. Also, each robot belonging to a swarm could easily be replaced as they would be understandably much cheaper.

Prof. McLurkin specializes in distributed algorithms for multi-robot systems a.k.a. swarm robotics. This field deals with interactions between multiple robots within a large group as well as their collective behavior. Imagine bees, ants, or a school of fish. To learn more about his work, you may view some of his projects on his own webpage.