Robotics Institute: Recent News

Byron Spice
bspice@cs.cmu.edu
412-268-9068

Recent News

		Zoë Returns To Atacama On NASA Mission To Search for Subsurface Life June 11, 2013. The autonomous, solar-powered Zoë, which became the first robot to map microbial life during a 2005 field expedition in Chile’s Atacama Desert, is heading back to the world’s driest desert this month on a NASA astrobiology mission led by Carnegie Mellon University and the SETI Institute. This time, Zoë is equipped with a one-meter drill to search for subsurface life.

		Startup by RI Alums Gets High-Profile Spot at Apple WWDC June 11, 2013. Anki, a robotics startup founded by a trio of Robotics Institute alumni, emerged from stealth mode to announce its first product during one of the highest profile events in the tech world: the keynote of Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference June 10 in San Francisco.

		Siewiorek Named Director of Quality of Life Technology Center June 05, 2013. Daniel P. Siewiorek has been named director of the Quality of Life Technology (QoLT) Center, a National Science Foundation Engineering Research Center. Carnegie Mellon University and the University of Pittsburgh are partners in the center, which focuses on creating intelligent systems that improve the quality of life for everyone while enabling older adults and people with disabilities.

		Carnegie Mellon Joins Launch of Alliance To Mentor African-American Computer Scientists May 21, 2013. Carnegie Mellon University has joined Clemson University and five other university partners to launch the Institute for African-American Mentoring in Computing Science (iAAMCS), a U.S. resource for increasing African-American participation in computing. It includes a robotics competition that will be run by David Touretzky, research professor of computer science.

		QoLT Center on "Our Region's Business" May 13, 2013. The Allegheny Conference's Sunday morning television program, "Our Region's Business" on WPXI featured the Quality of Life Technology Center in its May 5 episode. Host Bill Flanigan visited the University of Pittsburgh lab in Bakery Square and interviewed Dan Siewiorek, QoLT Center director and professor of electrical and computer engineering and computer science, and Pitt's Rory Cooper, the center's co-director. The episode is available on YouTube.

		Robotics Institute Helps Make Stunning Satellite Imagery Easily Accessible May 09, 2013. Members of the public can now easily explore almost 30 years of Earth imagery from NASA’s Landsat through TIME Magazine’s new Timelapse project. The project is a collaborative effort between TIME, Google, NASA and the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS), with the assistance of Carnegie Mellon University’s Robotics Institute.

		NREC's Robotic Paint-stripping System Is Edison Award Winner May 06, 2013. A robotic paint-stripping system being developed by Carnegie Mellon University's National Robotics Engineering Center and Concurrent Technologies Corporation of Johnstown, Pa., was named a Gold winner in the materials science category of the 2013 Edison Awards, announced April 25 at an awards ceremony in Chicago.

		More Than a Good Eye: HERB Uses Arms and More To Discover Objects May 06, 2013. A robot can struggle to discover objects in its surroundings when it relies on computer vision alone. But by taking advantage of all of the information available to it — an object’s location, size, shape and even whether it can be lifted — a robot can continually discover and refine its understanding of objects, say researchers at Carnegie Mellon University’s Robotics Institute.

		“Girl of Steel” Wins Dean’s List Honor at FIRST Championship May 03, 2013. Naoka Gunawardena, a junior at The Ellis School and a member of the Girls of Steel, a robotics team sponsored by the Field Robotics Center, was one of 10 national winners of Dean’s List honors at the FIRST (For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology) Robotics Competition Championship April 27 in St. Louis.

		RI's Whitman Competes on Discovery's “Big Brain Theory” April 25, 2013. Eric Whitman, a fifth-year Ph.D. student in the Robotics Institute, was one of 10 people who compete in the new Discovery Channel series, "Big Brain Theory: Pure Genius" hosted by Kal Penn. The show, which seeks to identify talented young innovators, will premiere at 10 p.m. May 1.

		Hear Me Launches School Climate Campaign April 24, 2013. The Hear Me Project of the Robotics Institute’s CREATE Lab will launch a new four-month campaign focused on the theme of School Climate with an open house from 6 to 8 p.m. Friday at Big Dog Coffee, 2717 Sarah St., on the South Side.

		Nourbakhsh Joins Hillman Photography Initiative April 22, 2013. Illah Nourbakhsh, professor of robotics, is one of five agents in the Carnegie Museum of Art's new Hillman Photography Initiative. The initiative aims to be a living laboratory for exploring the rapidly changing field of photography and its impact on the world.

		Whittaker Talks Driverless Cars April 04, 2013. William “Red” Whittaker, professor of robotics, talked with the Big Picture Science radio show about driverless cars. Listen to his interview about the technology and where it is taking us. Whittaker is a pioneer of autonomous navigation and led Carnegie Mellon's victorious Tartan Racing Team in the 2007 DARPA Urban Challenge robot race.

		Nourbakhsh's Book Suggests Humans Brace Themselves for Robo-Innovation March 25, 2013. Robots already vacuum our floors, help dispose of bombs and are exploring Mars. But in his new book, “Robot Futures,” Illah Nourbakhsh, professor of robotics at Carnegie Mellon University, argues that robots are not just wondrous machines, but a new species that bridges the material and digital worlds. The ramifications for society are both good and bad, he says, and people need to start thinking about that.

		Human-Scale CHIMP Robot Has Four Limbs, But Moves Like a Tank March 12, 2013. A team from Carnegie Mellon University’s National Robotics Engineering Center is building a new class of robot to compete in the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency’s (DARPA) Robotics Challenge — a human-size robot that moves, not by walking, but on rubberized tracks on the extremities of each of its four limbs. Though the appearance of the CMU Highly Intelligent Mobile Platform, or CHIMP, is vaguely simian, its normal mode of locomotion will be much like that of a tank, with the tracks of all four limbs on the ground.

		HERB Debuts in Oreo “Cookie vs. Creme” Video March 08, 2013. The Robotics Institute’s Home Exploring Robot Butler, better known as HERB, is featured in a YouTube video that is part of Oreo’s ongoing “Cookie vs. Creme” campaign. The video, shot Feb. 12 in the Personal Robotics Lab in Newell-Simon Hall, debuted March 8.

		Platypus airboats have a Nexus S for a brain, we go eyes-on (video) February 28, 2013. Here's another extremely cool offshoot of the Carnegie Mellon Robotics Institute. Platypus LLC build autonomous robotic airboats that can be deployed for a wide range of usages including environmental data and monitoring hard-to-reach spots after natural disasters like flooding.

		BallCam Gives Spectators Ball's-Eye View of Football Field February 27, 2013. Football fans have become accustomed to viewing televised games from a dozen or more camera angles, but researchers at Carnegie Mellon University and the University of Electro-Communications (UEC) in Tokyo suggest another possible camera position: inside the ball itself. They have shown that a camera embedded in the side of a rubber-sheathed plastic foam football can record video while the ball is in flight that could give spectators a unique, ball’s-eye view of the playing field.

		Kanade: Computer Vision to Drive Sports, Entertainment, Medicine February 25, 2013. Takeo Kanade, one of the world’s foremost researchers in computer vision, spoke to students, faculty and the community as part of the A. Nico Habermann Distinguished Lecture Series in Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University in Qatar.

		HERB Welcomes President-elect Suresh February 22, 2013. HERB, the Home Exploring Robot Butler, was among the first campus celebrities to shake hands with CMU President-elect Subra Suresh and his family at a Feb. 21 welcome reception in Rangos Hall. The Robotics Institute’s Personal Robotics Lab uses the two-armed HERB as a testbed for algorithms, software and other technology that will enable robots to perform challenging manipulation tasks in places where people live and work.

		Knight Gets “Medieval” on Robot Combat League February 15, 2013. Heather Knight is accustomed to working with a 2-foot-tall, plastic-bodied humanoid robot named Data, a robot comedian that is part of her research on social robotics. As a contestant on a new Syfy series, however, she controls a much different beast: an 8-foot-tall fighting robot called Medieval. Made of steel and chain mail and brandishing a shield, Medieval is one of 12 robots built especially for Robot Combat League, which premieres at 10 p.m. ET on Feb. 26.

		Whittaker Leads NASA Study to Keep Planetary Rovers Rolling February 14, 2013. William “Red” Whittaker, director of Carnegie Mellon’s Field Robotics Center and CEO of Astrobotic Technology Inc., will lead a NASA-funded study to figure out how robots such as the Mars rover Curiosity can avoid getting stuck in sinking sand or similarly hazardous terrain.

		CMU To Develop Robots for Anglo American PLC January 09, 2013. Carnegie Mellon University has signed a five-year master agreement with one of the world’s largest mining companies, London-based Anglo American PLC, to develop robotic technologies for mining.

		Bloomberg Businessweek Features CMU's Robot-Snake Charmer January 04, 2013. Bloomberg Businessweek ran a profile on Howie Choset, professor of robotics, and about his pioneering work in building snake-like robots. “He is pushing his robots to operate in environments robots traditionally couldn’t work in — sand, debris, rubble,” says Daniel Goldman, a physics and biology researcher at Georgia Institute of Technology and research collaborator with Choset.

		Schwartz Team Demonstrates Mind Control of Robot Arm December 17, 2012. A research team led by Andrew Schwartz, a professor of neurobiology at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine and an adjunct faculty member in the Carnegie Mellon Robotics Institute, has enabled a woman with longstanding quadriplegia to control a human-like robot arm using two electrodes implanted in her brain. Watch CBS's 60 Minutes report.

		Head-Mounted Cameras Could Help Robots Understand Social Interactions December 13, 2012. What is everyone looking at? It’s a common question in social settings because the answer identifies something of interest, or helps delineate social groupings. Those insights someday will be essential for robots designed to interact with humans, so researchers at Carnegie Mellon University’s Robotics Institute have developed a method for detecting where people’s gazes intersect. The researchers tested the method using groups of people with head-mounted video cameras. By noting where their gazes converged in three-dimensional space, the researchers could determine if they were listening to a single speaker, interacting as a group, or even following the bouncing ball in a ping-pong game.

		Reddy Named ACM Fellow December 12, 2012. The Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) has named Raj Reddy, the Mozah Bint Nasser University Professor of Computer Science and Robotics and the founding director of the Robotics Institute, among its latest class of ACM Fellows.

		Tiramisu App Wins FCC Chairman’s Award December 10, 2012. The Carnegie Mellon research team that created Tiramisu, a smartphone app that enables transit riders to create realtime information about bus schedules and seating, has won this year’s Federal Communications Commission Chairman’s Award for Advancement in Accessibility in the Geo-Location Services category.

		Smart Headlight Makes Car and Driver Top 10 List December 07, 2012. Car and Driver magazine named Srinivasa Narasimhan's smart headlight system as one of the ten most promising technologies for 2013. The system can improve visibility in rain and snowstorms by constantly redirecting light to shine between particles of precipitation.

		RobotRadar.org Seeks to Tell the Rest of the Story December 03, 2012. RobotRadar.org, a web site co-founded by Illah Nourbakhsh, professor of robotics at Carnegie Mellon University, will share the insights of leading thinkers and experts in robotics regarding the popular news media’s coverage of robotics.

		RI Alum Among Most Powerful Authors in Hollywood November 29, 2012. Daniel Wilson, the author of the best-selling "Robopocalypse" and a Ph.D. alumnus of the Robotics Institute, is among the 25 most powerful authors in Hollywood, according to the Hollywood Reporter.

		Getting Small UAVs To Imitate Human Pilots Flying Through Dense Forests November 15, 2012.

		NREC and CTC To Develop Paint-Stripping System for Aircraft November 26, 2012. Carnegie Mellon University’s National Robotics Engineering Center (NREC) and Concurrent Technologies Corporation (CTC) of Johnstown, Pa., are working with the Air Force Research Laboratory and Ogden Air Logistics Center 309 AMXG to develop and demonstrate a robotic system that uses high-powered lasers to remove coatings from fighter and cargo aircraft.

		Wineries Uncork Advanced Technology March 03, 2011. Intel reports on work with Carnegie Mellon University to apply robotic technology to vineyard operations.

		CMU researchers dive into agricultural innovation October 29, 2010. The Pittsburgh Business Times reports on work at Carnegie Mellon University to apply ro robotics to the specialty agriculture community, including the grape industry.

		How to Make UAVs Fully Autonomous July 15, 2009. MIT Technology Review reports on work at Carnegie Mellon University to use advanced vision systems to help unmanned aerial vehicles detect airborne obstacles and help achiever greater autonomy.

		Sitti Featured in BBC Report on Gecko Adhesion November 13, 2012. The BBC recently reported on the science of geckos and the secret behind their uncanny climbing ability. Metin Sitti, professor of robotics and mechanical engineering, said creating synthetic materials that provide the same sort of adhesion as a gecko's footpad could lead to new kinds of closure technologies.

		NREC Will Help Develop Autonomous ASW Vessel January 02, 2013. The Robotics Institute's National Robotics Engineering Center is part of a team assembled by prime contractor Science Applications International Corporation (SAIC) to design, build and test an unmanned autonomous surface vessel that can track a diesel-electric submarine for months and over thousands of kilometers with minimal supervision. The SAIC has released a YouTube video showing how this new type of craft could be deployed.

		NOVA ScienceNOW Profiles Treuille November 09, 2012. The Nov. 14 episode of NOVA ScienceNOW, “What Will the Future Look Like?” featured a profile of Adrien Treuille, assistant professor of computer science and robotics, and EteRNA, his unique research project that taps online game play to explore RNA design.

		Two CMU Teams to Compete in DARPA Robotics Challenge October 24, 2012. Roboticists at Carnegie Mellon University will field two teams in the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) Robotics Challenge, a competition in which robots will perform complex, physically challenging tasks as they respond to disaster scenarios in human-engineered environments, such as nuclear power plants.

The Robotics Institute

Menu