Robots could perform some of the “dull, dirty and dangerous” jobs associated with combating the COVID-19 pandemic, but that would require many new capabilities not currently being funded or developed, an editorial in the journal Science Robotics argues. The editorial, published today and signed by leading academic researchers including Carnegie Mellon University’s Howie Choset, said [...]
What Can Cities, Businesses and Civic Groups Do About Pandemics? Political scientist and urban specialist Robert Muggah has worked with the Robotics Institute’s CREATE Lab to use the lab’s EarthTime platform to examine the threat of pandemics such as COVID-19 and ponder how governments and other groups can respond. The presentation displays time-lapse images of [...]
Artificial intelligence is the creation of human beings, including a number from Carnegie Mellon University. Now, AI is changing humans. It's a subject that Illah Nourbakhsh of the Robotics Institute and Jennifer Keating of the Dietrich College of Humanities and Social Science explore in an interdisciplinary CMU course, "AI and Humanity." Nourbakhsh and Keating [...]
Our own Chris Atkeson sat down with the Wired crew for an in-depth discussion of robotics technologies in movies and television: I, Robot, Blade Runner, Terminator, Westworld (2016), Making Mr. Right, Austin Powers, Minority Report, Westworld (1973), Battlestar Galactica, Rising Sun, Bicentennial Man, Transformers, Black Mirror and Chernobyl. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aH480zit0Tg Wired Technique Critique : Season 1 [...]
Maneuvering wheeled robots up and down stairwells and flying drones slim enough to slip through narrow doorways and tough enough to survive collisions are among the new capabilities Team Explorer has added for the latest competition in the DARPA Subterranean Challenge. Explorer, which includes researchers from Carnegie Mellon University and Oregon State University, is one [...]
Ziko Kolter and Ioannis Gkioulekas Ziko Kolter, an associate professor in the Computer Science Department (CSD), and Ioannis Gkioulekas, an assistant professor in the Robotics Institute, are among 126 early career researchers to receive 2020 Sloan Research Fellowships. The prestigious fellowships honor outstanding scholars in the U.S. and Canada in eight scientific and [...]
Sharp-eyed attendees of the Threads of Truth fiber arts based exhibition in the Zhou B. Art Center might notice that Vivian Lin's new soft sculpture "Thy Eve" is made of samples and scraps from the research performed in the CMU Textiles Lab [autoknit, visualknit]. Vivian gathered these scraps during an informal residence at the textiles [...]
The American Foundation for the Blind (AFB) announced that Chieko Asakawa, an IBM Fellow and the IBM Distinguished Service Professor in Carnegie Mellon University’s Robotics Institute, is one of three recipients this year of its prestigious Helen Keller Achievement Awards. The AFB recognizes Asakawa for her life’s work in furthering accessibility research and development, from [...]
Robotics Institute Research Professor Katia Sycara DARPA Project Aims To Use Machine Social Intelligence to Improve Teamwork PITTSBURGH—Personal assistants today can figure out what you are saying, but what if they could infer what you were thinking based on your actions? A team of academic and industrial researchers led by Carnegie Mellon University [...]
In the Human and Robot Partners (HARP) Lab at Carnegie Mellon University, a robot mounted to a table must choose between three candy dishes. The robot — a sleek, multi-jointed black arm — has a camera mounted to its two-fingered gripper. The machine analyzes the eye gaze of a graduate student seated across the table [...]