{"id":84584,"date":"2026-01-12T13:51:13","date_gmt":"2026-01-12T13:51:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/84584\/"},"modified":"2026-01-12T13:51:13","modified_gmt":"2026-01-12T13:51:13","slug":"gripping-robotics-course-fuels-hands-on-collaborative-learning","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/84584\/","title":{"rendered":"Gripping Robotics Course Fuels Hands-On, Collaborative Learning"},"content":{"rendered":"


\n \"Robots\" <\/p>\n


\n Robots \n <\/p>\n


\n <\/a> <\/p>\n

This fall, Clark collaborated with Styler, who has extensive expertise\u00a0in software and robotics. The two expanded the breadth of the course to involve two types of robots\u2014the playfully nicknamed pinchers<\/a> and burgers<\/a> (the former an articulated arm with a gripper, the latter a mobile circular unit).<\/p>\n

The students, in pairs, built their burger robots from kits and set to work programming both the arm and the mover. In their lab space, they applied the concepts that they learned in lectures.<\/p>\n

\u201cMy biggest takeaway was learning all the fundamentals and then actually implementing them\u2014getting that hands-on experience working with inverse kinematics and motion planning, and learning more about the world of robots,\u201d said Sam Kester, a fourth-year mechanical engineering student.<\/p>\n

All semester, the teams worked toward their final project. They programmed the pinchers to retrieve a highlighter pen and place it in a storage bin connected to the burger. The burger would then maneuver through the maze and drop the pen at the other end.\u00a0<\/p>\n

‘;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Robots This fall, Clark collaborated with Styler, who has extensive expertise\u00a0in software and robotics.…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":84585,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[3892,3893,3894,3895,73,75,74,13148],"class_list":["post-84584","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-pittsburgh","tag-banner","tag-dept-banner","tag-mems","tag-pitt-swanson-school-of-engineering","tag-pittsburgh","tag-pittsburgh-headlines","tag-pittsburgh-news","tag-student-profiles"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/84584","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=84584"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/84584\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/84585"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=84584"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=84584"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=84584"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}