Summer picnic editions in July and August

FRIDAY, July 16th,  7-9pm

We are on a picnic throughout the summer
Join us!

Come at 7 PM and meet the ChargeCar crew, Illah Nourbakhsh and Gregg Podnar, Friday July 16th at their "garage" and learn about an exciting new project in electric cars.


ChargeCar is dedicated to open, community-centered teamwork for making electric vehicles practical and affordable enough to revolutionize urban commuting.  With ChargeCar, you can calculate the cost of commuting with an electric car using your actual commute data, compare the efficiency of gasoline and electric cars for your trips, browse commutes across the country and work on a smart controller for a programming contest.

The project aims to develop a novel battery and super-capacitor system to power electric cars. ChargeCar is gathering real commute data to develop algorithms that customize energy use based on your personal driving habits. You, Green Drinks folks,  can contribute to ther growing set of commute data by visiting http://www.chargecar.org/participate. And, also help develop more efficient algorithms by entering Charge Car's programming contest here: http://www.chargecar.org/invent. Our ultimate goal is to develop a conversion kit that will allow local mechanics to reuse old vehicles by replacing their internal combustion engines with our all-electric system.


Who you will meet and what they have to say by way of introduction:


Illah Nourbakhsh (co-PI of ChargeCar; Director, CREATE)
I came to CMU in 1997 to begin work in human-robot interaction and educational robotics. Since then I have founded the CREATE Lab and have watched it grow into a large research center that is designing, inventing and deploying technology empowerment programs around the world, from parent-child messaging technologies for early childhood care all the way to robotics projects, electric car conversions and environmental sensing for adults.  I was a civil servant at NASA/Ames, where I was Robotics Lead, and I have also spent three sabbaticals away from CMU, in Lausanne, Switzerland and in San Francisco.  I play classical guitar, have a helicopter and airplane license and I keep bees with my wife, Marti.

Gregg Podnar (co-PI of ChargeCar)
Over the past thirty years I have designed and built many task-specific mobile robots and manipulators; stereoscopic telepresence systems; and surgical instruments.  Most of this has been in labs of CMU's Robotics Institute.  For ChargeCar within the CREATE Lab, I am a Co-Investigator with a focus on the predictive commuter vehicle management of compound energy storage combining supercapacitors with moderate-rate batteries.  Other robotics systems included mineral prospecting, and water quality research for NASA's Exploration System Mission Directorate, and Earth Sciences Technology Office. I have also taught English and Computer Science in Asia, and developed computer-based vision examination systems.

Location
ChargeCar's Electric Garage,  located at the former Exxon Gas Station on the 4600 block of Forbes Avenue, next to CMU.  A map of the area can be found: here