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[Lab image] Mobile Robot Lab
This lab is no longer active.

Head: Hans Moravec

Mailing address:
Carnegie Mellon University
Robotics Institute
5000 Forbes Avenue
Pittsburgh, PA 15213

Location:
NSH 2211

Jump to: Lab Description | Personnel | Projects | Publications

Lab Description

The Mobile Robot Laboratory is engaged in long-term basic research in perception, control and planning for robots that navigate through complex indoor and outdoor spaces. Since 1981, building on work conducted at Stanford University since 1973, the lab has built three dissimilar mobile robots (Pluto, Neptune and Uranus) and demonstrated new methods that allow them to map and navigate cluttered surroundings by stereo and monocular vision, by broad beam sonar, scanning laser rangefinder and other sensors.

The two decades of experience have given us the means and confidence to develop a mobile robot control program with enough spatial competence to reliably execute tasks like delivery and floor care in normal areas, with no special navigational aids and trained only by an initial run through. Our current efforts may result in a laboratory prototype of the first mobile robots with mass market potential.

Our approach accumulates sensed evidence about surrounding geometry in a spatial grid. We plan to integrate about ten thousand 3D location estimates from multi-baseline stereo vision several times per meter traveled. Preliminary, but very efficient, implementations of stereo and 3D grid algorithms suggest that 100 to 1000 MIPS of computer power will suffice to safely guide walking-speed robots through normal indoors. This amount of computing power will be inexpensive by the end of the decade, and we anticipate the widespread use of freely roaming robots shortly thereafter.

Past members

Name Title Email Address
Mike Blackwell Senior Research Engineer
Frank Dellaert PhD Student, CS
Kevin Dowling Project Scientist
Jesse Easudes Visiting Engineer
Martin C. Martin PhD Student, RI
Hans Moravec Adjunct Faculty (Adjunct) hpm@andrew.cmu.edu
Patrick Muir Adjunct Research Scientist (Adjunct)
Gregg's personal homepage Gregg Podnar Program Manager gwp@cmu.edu
Anthony's personal homepage Anthony (Tony) Stentz Research Professor/Assoc Dir NREC tony+@cmu.edu
Chuck Thorpe Dean, Qatar Campus thorpe@qatar.cmu.edu
Jie Yang Senior Systems Scientist, CS yang+@cs.cmu.edu

Past projects

Daedalus - We deveopled Daedalus, a six-legged frame-walker with efficient redundant drive systems, for extreme terrain missions as part of the Lunar Rover Initiative.
Neptune Mobile Robot - three wheeled robot trike
Pluto - Flexible platform for computer vision
Single Leg Testbed - We developed the Single Leg Testbed as a full-scale working prototype for the Ambler.
Terregator - We developed the Terregator to serve as a testbed machine for a wide variety of projects.
Uranus - mobile robot used for developing 3D mapping and sensing

Recent publications [View all 18 publications]

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