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Obituary: Alan Guisewite Was a Robotics Institute Factotum

       Alan Guisewite, an operations assistant in the Robotics Institute for 40 years, died earlier this month. He was 74.   His official title was operations assistant. But between his technical capabilities, institutional memory and seemingly comprehensive knowledge of building materials, Alan Guisewite was a veritable Swiss Army knife in the [...]

MRSD Team Pairs With Penguins on Autonomous Zamboni Machine

Robots in Carnegie Mellon University's Newell-Simon Hall can explore the moon, slither across the ground, crawl down pipes, and drive autonomously through deserts and cities. With the building's latest inhabitant, CMU researchers are putting autonomy to work on ice. A student team from Carnegie Mellon's Robotics Institute (RI), dubbed AI on Ice, has partnered with [...]

Learning to Grasp the Ungraspable with Emergent Extrinsic Dexterity

Exciting new work from the R-Pad Lab's Wenxuan Zhou and David Held features a simple gripper that can solve more complex manipulation tasks if it can utilize the external environment such as pushing the object against the table or a vertical wall, known as "Extrinsic Dexterity." From the researchers: A simple gripper can solve more [...]

RISLab Wins SSRR 2022 Best Paper Award

Congratulations to the authors Kshitij Goel, Yves Georgy Daoud, Nathan Michael, and Wennie Tabib for their Best Paper Award at the IEEE International Symposium on Safety, Security, and Rescue Robotics (SSRR) 2022. Their paper "Hierarchical Collision Avoidance for Adaptive-Speed Multirotor Tele-Operation" was selected out of 56 accepted papers.

A Low-Cost Robot Ready for Any Obstacle

This little robot can go almost anywhere. Researchers at Carnegie Mellon University's School of Computer Science and the University of California, Berkeley, have designed a robotic system that enables a low-cost and relatively small legged robot to climb and descend stairs nearly its height; traverse rocky, slippery, uneven, steep and varied terrain; walk across gaps; [...]

Stretching Sound

It's not Beethoven, Bruno Mars or even the Beatles, but students from across Carnegie Mellon University assembled quite a band this summer. The students came from the School of Computer Science's Robotics Institute; the Entertainment Technology Center; the School of Music; and the Integrative Design, Arts and Technology Network (IDeATe). Their instruments were made of [...]

CMU Researchers Develop Algorithm To Divvy Up Tasks for Human-Robot Teams

Aaron Aupperlee Robotics Institute researchers have developed an algorithmic planner that helps delegate tasks to humans and robots. As robots increasingly join people on the factory floor, in warehouses and elsewhere on the job, dividing up who will do which tasks grows in complexity and importance. People are better suited for some tasks, [...]

2022 Doherty Award Recipient Howie Choset Kavčić-Moura Professor of Computer Science

Howie Choset is a Professor of Robotics where he serves as the co-director, along with Matt Travers, of the Biorobotics Lab. Choset's research program has made contributions to strategically significant problems in surgery, manufacturing, on-orbit maintenance, recycling and search and rescue. His work is most famous for its snake robots and other biologically inspired systems [...]

CMU Building Moonshot Mission Control for Upcoming Lunar Exploration

As their rovers explore unknown terrain on the moon's surface, researchers at Carnegie Mellon University will watch from the familiar confines of campus, nearly 240,000 miles away. CMU’s Moonshot Mission Control, a new command center in the School of Computer Science's Gates Center for Computer Science, will provide state-of-the-art equipment to the crews of the [...]