New Technologies and Applications in Robotics

Abstract

Robots are being used in a growing number and variety of settings, and they are becoming increasingly sophisticated in the areas of perception (sensors and transducers), cognition (computation, planning, and learning), and manipulation (mechanisms, kinematics, dynamics, and control). Three areas of robotics research underway at Carnegie-Mellon University are examined: autonomous mobile systems for outdoor and hazardous environments, robot-assisted shape deposition manufacturing, and microelectromechanical systems for medical and other applications. Among the specific areas under investigation are vision-based autonomous driving, computer-aided manufacturing systems that produce physical objects directly from computer-aided design models with minimal human intervention, miniature actuators and sensors, and micromachining techniques.