Creating a Multi-robot Stage Production

A multi-robot stage production is novel and challenging as different robots have to communicate and coordinate to produce a smooth performance. We made a multi-robot stage production possible using the NAO humanoid robots and the Lego Mindstorms NXT robots with a group of undergraduate women who had programming experience, but little experience with robots. The undergraduates from around the world were participating in a three day workshop – Opportunities for Undergraduate Research in Computer Science (OurCS), organized by the School of Computer Science from Carnegie Mellon University that provide opportunities for these undergraduates to work on computing-related research problems. They were given twelve and a half hours over a span of three days to familiarize themselves with the robots, plan the storyboard of the performance, program the robots, generate a multi-robot performance and create a presentation on what they learned and did. In this paper, we describe the tools and infrastructure we created to support the creation of a multi-robot stage production within the allocated time and explain how the time in the workshop was allocated to enable the undergraduates to complete the multi-robot stage production.