Last week, Professor Naira Hovakimyan and researchers in her lab at Illinois partnered with the Montessori School of Champaign-Urbana to develop an outreach event that showcased robotics to a group of elementary-age students.
Hovakimyan and her doctoral students Thiago Marinho and Arun Lakshmanan brought several ground robots as well as drones for the children to learn about and to try out with the controllers.
Hovakimyan leads the Advanced Controls Research Laboratory at Illinois, which tackles a wide range of controls-related areas, including drone delivery technology, machine learning, cyber-physical systems, adaptive flight control, design of human-centered automation, and more.