ECC has been slowly acquiring robots for student use. We started with three BoeBots from  Parallax. The robots have a circuit board with a breadboard area for building circuits that rests on an aluminum chassis. The chassis has two powered wheels and a rolling ball. They are programmed by connecting them to a PC with a serial cable. The robots can be programmed in either Java or BASIC. The robots are purchased as kits and assembled here at ECC. Each of the robots was equipped with a line follower module that allows the robot to follow a line that is on the ground beneath the robot

The first three robots were named Huey, Dewey, and Louie after the three robots in the movie Silent Running

The next two robots that we received were exactly the same as the second two. They were named Gort after the robot in the movie The Day the earth Stood Still, and Andrew, after the robot in the movie Bicentennial Man. Andrew has been modified to carry a television camera. Gort also had some modifications (an infrared receiver) that allowed him to follow R2D2 around.

The next two robot kits we received were slightly different than the first three. The circuit board sits up higher on the chassis and the line follower module had different sensors. With some modifications to the line follower modules we were able to get the robots to behave similar to the first three. The second two robots were named R2D2 and C3PO after the robots in the movie Star Wars. C3P0 was later modified with the crawler kit to be a walking robot instead of a rolling robot.

In 2005 we acquired 6 more robots. They are different from the previous robots in that they are programmed using USB instead of an RS-232 serial port. The robots are named David and Joe from the movie AI. Robbie from the movie Forbidden Planet, Robot B9 from the television series Lost in Space, Johnny 5 from the movie Short Circuit, and Tobor from the movie Tobor the Great.

The robots David, Joe, and Robby have been configured as line following robots. Nine of the robots have that configuration and are used in classes like CIS 207 (Java Programming). Robot B9 has been configured with a gripper Robotic arm that allows him to pick up objects the size of a golf ball. He also has infrared sensors that give him a crude form of vision.Tobor has been configured with a color TV camera that allows the robot to see his environment. Johnny 5 has been equipped with tracks instead of wheels and has a speech syntheses module that allows him to talk.