Giving Tours of the Robotics Institute

Things you may want to be aware of...

Tour Personnelle

  • Catherine Copetas is the RI Tour Contact Person.
  • Kiran Bhat, Aaron Courville and Rob Zlot are the RI Tour Whips.
  • Chris Urmson is the RoboOrg Tour Maintainer.

RI Tour Policy

Robotics graduate students will give general-purpose tours of the Robotics Institute to outside visitors as a community service activity. If the tour has a specific purpose or research focus, or involves a demonstration, then the appropriate researchers, faculty, or project members should be contacted to give the tour. Giving tours is not an essential student activity so it should not interfere with academic or research work. The following guidelines attempt to insure this.

  • With the exception of first-year students, all robotics graduate students will give general tours of the Robotics Institute. First-year students are the only group exempt from giving tours.

  • All robotics graduate students will keep a current version of their weekly schedule in their .plan file which can be viewed by: "finger [userid]@[address]".

  • the RI Tour Coordinator, a staff person, will first solicit volunteers for a specific tour by mailing to robotics-students@ri.cmu.edu. If no one volunteers for a particular tour, the Tour Coordinator will consult the RI Tour Queue.

  • A queue of the eligible students will be managed by the RI Tour Queue Maintainer, a RoboGrad. The student who has the least number of tour credits per "enrolled semester" (in Lieberman Queue fashion) will be at the top of the queue; the student with the most will be at the bottom. The RI Tour Coordinator always begins at the top of the queue when contacting students to give tours and works down, without regard to the student's areas of expertise.

  • Area of expertise preference can be used to decide which student to contact first, in the event of equal position in the queue.

  • Students should be requested 2 weekdays before a tour is to be given. Students can accept the request or refuse to give the tour if a reasonable research or academic reason is provided.

  • If a tour is requested on less than 2 weekdays notice, the student may accept the request or refuse without explanation.

  • If a tour is requested on a weekend, the student may accept the request or refuse without explanation.

  • If no student is available to give a tour, it is the responsibility of the RI tour coordinator to give the tour, find a faculty member or researcher, or refuse the visitor.

  • An RI guidebook will be maintained to assist tour providers. It will contain: current queue information, maps to each lab, keys to necessary doors, and information on each tour point of interest. It will be the faculty's responsibility to provide up-to-date information on each lab.

  • One tour credit will accrue for each tour for which the RoboGrad was popped off the queue.

  • Two tour credits will accrue for each tour for which the RoboGrad volunteered, provided the tour was solicited by the Tour Coordinator.

  • One tour credit will accrue for each tour of significance (meaning comparable to a normal RI tour) that a RoboGrad provides at the request of his or her advisor (or through an "official channel" other than the Tour Coordinator).

  • Two tour credits will be awarded to the Tour Queue Maintainer each semester.
The historical policies governing the tours can be found here.

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