9354898 Johnson This fellowship project will train students in robotics and intelligent controls, focusing on the study of adaptive colonies of adaptive robots. Oberlin College and Valparaiso University, both with active programs to recruit women and ethnic minority undergraduates, will be feeder schools for the Graduate Research Traineeship (GRT) program. Indiana University will provide enhanced stipends to recruit and retain women and ethnic minority students who might not otherwise choose a scientific career. The Computer Science Department will ensure degree completion with additional advising and mentoring activities. The GRT fellows' analytical skills, inter-disciplinary breadth, and rigorous empiricism will be developed through coursework, collaborations with faculty and senior graduate students at Indiana University, and an external research semester in the Santa Fe Institute's program in adaptive computation. The experimental component of the training program is solidly founded on the department's innovative research, which has produced the inexpensive miniature hexapod robot Stiquito, and analog VLSI Lukasiewicz logic arrays that are being applied as sensors, inference engines, and controllers for the robot. GRT fellows will study the principles of adaptive computation, systems implementation, and mobile robotics by simulating, building, and experimenting with Stiquito colonies. ***
