2013 Chancellors Award for excellence in undergraduate research.

Simon Penny was awarded the 2013 UCI Chancellors Award for excellence in undergraduate research for his work mentoring the Therabot Project under the UROP CALIT2 Multidisciplinary Design Project (MDP) initiative. The Therabot project pursued the prototyping of an autonomous robot with wifi two way video and bed-based control to serve the needs of kids in hopsital. The robot navigation is controlled by leg movements, and thus provides both gross motor/muscle exercise and sensorimotor precision exercise. The two way AV capability permits the child to carry on conversations, run errands and play games with the robot as embodied avatar.