FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
November 4, 2003
Contact: Jean Wasp, Media Relations, (707) 664-2057

Scientist Discusses His Robotic Work With Lots of Legs at Nov. 10 lecture

"Turn right. Now climb. Easy does it."

Robert Hogg lurks over the controls that command a robot to travel and avoid obstacles. But his robot is not part of a virtual game. It is "Urbie," an urban robot designed for mobile military reconnaissance in city terrain, to travel up several flights of stairs.

Urbie's features may assist police, emergency and rescue personnel in hazardous and hostile situations.

Hogg discusses new developments in robotics in a lecture at 4 p.m. on Monday, Nov. 10 in Darwin 108 as part of the weekly "What Physicists Do" lecture series at Sonoma State University.

Hogg's boyhood passion for robots led him to an internship and then a career at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif. In more than ten years at JPL, Hogg has already worked on some of the latest robotic vehicles to explore our own planet and beyond.

Recently, Hogg and a team of students created the "spider-bot," a miniature robot resembling the "itsy bitsy spider" in the popular nursery rhyme. But instead of crawling "up the water spout" as the rhyme goes, the spider-bot has greater ambitions, as does its creator.

The micro robot is designed to be part of a network of autonomous robots that one day may chart terrain on Mars, or crawl into tight spaces to make repairs on the International Space Station.

For a free poster describing all thirteen lectures in the series, see http://www.phys-astro.sonoma.edu/wpd/, send e-mail to gayle.walker@sonoma.edu, or call (707) 664-2119.