In Don Potter’s Intro to Robotics class, it’s not only the students that think for themselves.

Intro to Robotics teaches students how to program machines to navigate obstacles, as well as challenges their critical thinking. MICHAEL BARONE/Staff

“We’re all about autonomous behavior, letting the robots decide,” said Potter, director of the Artificial Intelligence Center. “To put the intelligence in the machine so it can make all the decisions. To make all the right decisions. People can make bad decisions, and we don’t give our robots that flexibility though we give our children that flexibility.”

A first glance at a robotics classroom may reveal a table full of circuitry and legos. But its the programming behind the robot, not what the machine is built of, that is cause for excitement.

“A.I. students are more interested in developing strategies rather than executing them,” said Shan Khan, an Artificial Intelligence graduate student from Delhi, India.

And that interest is what creates a classroom atmosphere where students want to stay late — and often do.

“That’s the good part of it,” said Mike Walliser, an artificial intelligence major from Athens. “An hour and 15 minutes isn’t enough. Once you get going, you just want to keep going. Enough isn’t really a definitive term in a programmer’s mind. And I mean, we’re playing with legos.”

In the beginning of Intro to Robotics, students are given the challenge of creating a robot made of legos that can navigate itself through an obstacle course of plastic bottles.

That enthusiasm helps students launch from obstacle-overcoming robots to real-world application.

“Space exploration is probably the most famous because we have these Rover things on Mars, but there are medical applications,” Potter said. “In Japan they have robots that do lots of different things. For example, in a hospital environment, it’ll pick you up out of a wheelchair and sit you on the bed.”

Many US examples of robotics, however, take the shape of household helpers.

“Everybody knows the Roomba,”Potter said. “iRobot also makes a swimming aid pool robot a gutter cleaner, and a whole crew of things they used to have commercials about in the 50s, that’ll clean your room or mop your floor.”

But beyond the scope of everyday life, robotics takes the form of militia and medical purposes.

“Clarke County has a really nice robot for its police,” Potter said. “It has microphone, tread and sensors, so you could send it into a hostage situation, in say a bank, to be the eyes and ears.”

Expanding on the already established field of remote controlled robotics then becomes the tasks of students.

“It’s a little bit different for us because we’re not a heavy mechanical engineering-oriented program like Georgia Tech,” Potter said. “We kind of think of robots as a brawn and brain type thing. Because the brawn is the robot and the brains are what go in it. So our focus is developing intelligent behavior, whereas Georgia Tech’s goal might be to develop a car that can drive from Georgia to California autonomously.”

And though science fiction creates a world where thinking robots gun for domination, fear of technology is more of a threat than evil machinery.

“All the science fiction stuff is A.I. gone bad. That’s just sci-fi nonsense,” Potter said. “I mean, think about it. You got to have intelligent behavior, and then you have evil-intentioned intelligent behavior. I mean, what’s the goal: fame, or something? Robots don’t want to rule the world. We like to think of the robotics as Data from ‘Star Trek.’ A nice guy to have around.”

So developing programming intelligent behavior into the machine, while showing the usefulness of the end product, becomes another task of the science.

“It’s like fear of any sort of technology,” Potter said. “When they had horses and they were merging in to cars, oh fear. When they didn’t have computers and they were coming in to computers, big fear. But if you ask the lady on the news a couple of weeks back, who was walking for the first time since she had broken her back due to robotic hardware, she’s probably thinking, ‘Man, I’m glad I’m alive in this technological era. Because if I wasn’t I’d be a vegetable sitting in that hospital chair.’”

That technological era, where machine evolves to know best how to help man, is one that is only just beginning.

“Three months ago Bill Gates gave a press announcement where he said that robotics now is analogous to being in computer industry in the ’80s,” said Zane Everett, an A.I. student from Atlanta. “We’ve reached a level of sophistication where we can do a lot of neat things, but it’s not so sophisticated that there’s no room for innovation.”