They’re baaaack—crawling, clutching, spinning, racing and most of all teaching. The robots of the Advancing Robotics Technology for Societal Impact Alliance are again spanning the digital divide and captivating students from Historically Black Colleges and Universities with their possibilities.

More than two dozen students and faculty members from nine HBCUs joined their fellows at Carnegie Mellon University’s Robotics Institute beginning Aug. 8 for the alliance’s first series of summer workshops. The five-day conference included faculty training, organizational and community building seminars, as well as meetings on how and where to spend money to further ARTSI’s outreach.

SHAPE OF THINGS TO COME—CMU professor David Touretzky, Andrew Williams, ARTSI director from Spelman College and Norfolk State graduate student Glen Nickens experiment with having the Chiara robot pick up a miniature basketball with its unique arm.

“It was hugely productive and very intense. We got a lot done,” said CMU research professor David Touretzky. “Google, Intel and Apple all supported the event because they see this as a valuable talent pool.”

ARTSI grew from a previous collaboration between Touretzky and associate professor Andrew Williams at Spelman College in Atlanta, Ga., that established robotics labs at Spelman and three other HBCUs. In less than a year the number of HBCUs involved had increased to nine.

“The hands-on activities were excellent and seminars included a lot of interesting topics like robots in art and health care,” Williams said. “I was struck that this is the only conference of its kind and these are the guys who will impact other underrepresented students. So the future looks bright.”

 Touretzky said it is getting brighter.

“During the middle of our Thursday night seminar my phone rang, and it was a call letting me know that North Carolina A&T had become the 10th school to join,” Touretzky said. “And we have applications from two others, so I expect us to have our 12th by the end of summer.”

With African-Americans accounting for only 4.8 percent of the nation’s nearly two million computer and information scientists, the alliance’s immediate goals are straightforward:

•Increase the number of African-Americans who study computer science and robotics in college, and encourage them to pursue advanced training in graduate school;

•Increase the number of HBCU faculty who educate students in robotics and involve students in robotics research, and

•Recruit K-12 and HBCU students to pursue computer science and robotics education.

In the longer term, the alliance hopes to provide role modeling and mentoring for HBCU faculty and students in robotics education and research, create a nation-wide resource and learning community of African-Americans working in robotics and teaching, and enlarge the audience of students who find robotics and computing careers attractive.

“There are 150 HBCUs across the country, and while not all have robotics labs, many do,” Touretzky said. “So there’s a lot of room for expansion.”

This summer’s conference also allowed for some additional marketing with the unveiling just weeks before Touretzky’s newest creation, the Chiara, an insect-looking robot with a grasping arm somewhat resembling a Fiddler Crab. A former intern of Touretzky’s, Glen Nickens, who is now a master’s candidate at Norfolk State, is among those working on targeting and mapping protocols for the arm.

“Everybody wants the new robot because of the arm—there are actually two; one is a $500 arm with a webcam, the other has more freedom of movement,” Touretzky said. “But Chiara is only a few weeks old, so while we know its limits, we don’t really know what it can do—that depends on how clever we are.”

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