Researchers at Carnegie Mellon University's Robotics Institute (RI) have developed a robotic system that interactively co-paints with people. Collaborative FRIDA (CoFRIDA) can work with users of any artistic ability, inviting collaboration to create art in the real world. "It's like the drawing equivalent of a writing prompt," said Jim McCann, an associate RI professor who [...]
Carnegie Mellon University researchers from its Robotics Institute (RI) and College of Engineering are packing up fossil-inspired paleobionics, robotic hands and autonomous aerial vehicles to demonstrate to members of Congress and their staff at “Robotics for a Better Tomorrow: Robotics Showcase and Demo Day,” in Washington, D.C. on April 30. Over 30 researchers from federal agencies, industry [...]
The brown haze that settled over Pittsburgh and other U.S. cities last summer was merely an irritant to most residents, but for researchers at Carnegie Mellon University's Robotics Institute (RI), it was a reminder of why they are developing drones to help fight wildfires. The smoke was generated by record-breaking wildfires in Canada. Over the [...]
Kshitij Goel, a Ph.D. student in the Robotics Institute, was awarded the 2024 Alan J. Perlis Graduate Teaching Award by Carnegie Mellon University’s School of Computer Science (SCS) for outstanding work in redesigning and teaching Mobile Robot Algorithms Laboratory (MRAL), general excellence in teaching and student interaction, and dedication towards improving all courses in which [...]
David Held, an associate professor in Carnegie Mellon University's Robotics Institute, is one of two CMU faculty members selected to lead teams receiving Multidisciplinary University Research Initiative (MURI) funding from the Department of Defense (DoD). Created in 1985, the highly competitive MURI program provides important funding to teams pursuing basic research spanning multiple scientific disciplines with the goal of [...]
Carnegie Mellon University researchers teamed up with scientists at NASA to develop a robot capable of searching underwater oceans on distant planets for signs of life. NASA's Exobiology Extant Life Surveyor (EELS) is a self-propelled, autonomous, snake-like robot inspired by a desire to one day look for signs of life in the vast ocean beneath [...]
The CMU team is monitoring four small satellites as they communicate with each other, determining where they are relative to one another and autonomously maneuvering to stay within communication range. The satellites have no propulsion systems but can change their orbital positions by adjusting their orientation in flight to increase or decrease drag. These maneuvers [...]
Researchers in Carnegie Mellon University's Robotics Institute are developing a modular robot that can creep inside natural gas pipelines to map where pipes are, detect decrepit or leaking pipes, and, when necessary, repair the pipe by applying a resin coating along its inner wall. "We don't even know where all the old pipes are," said [...]
Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, Florida A bright dome of light pierced the night. As the light grew brighter and larger, it rose into the sky, taking the shape of a rocket dashing into space, a trail of exhaust left to mark its path. "Liftoff," shouted Zach Muraskin, a senior studying physics at Carnegie Mellon [...]
Congratulations to Changliu Liu for receiving the 2023 ARM Champion Award! The ARM Champion Award Program is an effort to recognize members of the Advanced Robotics for Manufacturing Institute who go above and beyond. Changliu has made a substantial impact to ARM through her work in robot safety. The ultimate goal of my research is [...]
Can AI match humans for artistic creativity? Rad Yeo explores the 'creep' of generative AI, from performing a ChatGPT written comedy routine to portrait painting robots. If it can, what does it mean for humanity? That is the question posed in the new documentary from ABC Australia featuring the work of Peter Schaldenbrand, Jim McCann [...]
Akhil Padmanabha knows about itching. His chronic itching caused by severe eczema was so debilitating that he was hospitalized twice and had to be home-schooled during most of his high school years. Itch so impacted his life that, as an undergraduate, he contemplated becoming a psychologist so he could help chronically ill teens facing similar [...]
Carnegie Mellon University's School of Computer Science (SCS) has launched a new undergraduate degree to educate and train the next generation of roboticists needed for the growing field. The Bachelor of Science in Robotics will fuse the school's rigorous computer science curriculum with the university's world-renowned work in robots, computer vision and artificial intelligence through [...]
Most people take getting dressed for granted. But data from the National Center for Health Statistics reveals that 92% of nursing facility residents and at-home care patients require assistance with dressing. Researchers at Carnegie Mellon University's Robotics Institute (RI) see a future where robots can help with this need and are working to make it [...]
Update: Congratulations to Zakia on winning in the AI in Research - AI Researcher of the Year category! Zakia Hammal, a systems scientist in Carnegie Mellon University's Robotics Institute and an assistant research professor in the Department of Biomedical Engineering, has been selected as a finalist for the prestigious Women in AI Awards North America [...]
CMU, Meta AI Researchers Develop Robotic Learning Agent That Can Master Multiple Skills RoboAgent can complete 12 manipulation skills across differing scenes. This research points toward a robotic learning platform adaptable to changing environments. Humans are social creatures and learn from each other, even from a young age. Infants keenly observe their parents, siblings or [...]
CMU's Autonomous Exploration Research Team has developed a suite of robotic systems and planners enabling robots to explore more quickly, probe the darkest corners of unknown environments, and create more accurate and detailed maps — all without human help. A research group in Carnegie Mellon University's Robotics Institute is creating the next generation [...]
Researchers at CMU and the Israel Institute of Technology’s Technion have created 3D sensors that capture micron-scale depth detail, like the raised height of Washington’s head on a U.S. quarter. Ever wonder what the raised height of Washington's head is on a U.S. quarter? Or the thickness of different inks on a chocolate bar wrapper? [...]
Dynamic Light Field Network (DyLiN) accommodates dynamic scene deformations, such as in avatar animation, where facial expressions can be used as controllable input attributes. Researchers from Carnegie Mellon University and Fujitsu have developed a new method to convert 2D images to a 3D structure. The work, led by Laszlo A. Jeni’s CUBE Lab in the [...]
Congratulations to members of Changliu Liu's Intelligent Control Lab Alvin Shek, Bo Ying Su and Rui Chen for winning the 2023 ICRA Outstanding Interaction Paper Award! The paper "Learning from Physical Human Feedback: An Object-Centric One-Shot Adaptation Method" received the 2023 ICRA Outstanding Interaction Paper award. For robots to be effectively deployed in novel environments [...]
Congratulations to Wennie Tabib, Kshitij Goel, John Yao, Curtis Boirum, and Nathan Michael for receiving an honorable mention for the IEEE T-RO King-Sun Fu Memorial Best Paper Award at the 2023 RAS Award Ceremony in London, UK! This award is for their work "Autonomous Cave Surveying with an Aerial Robot", which presents an exploration method [...]
The qualities that make a knitted sweater comfortable and easy to wear are the same things that might allow robots to better interact with humans. RobotSweater, developed by a research team from Carnegie Mellon University's Robotics Institute, is a machine-knitted textile "skin" that can sense contact and pressure. "We can use that to make the [...]
Congratulations to this year's National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship Program (GRFP) Recipients from the Robotics Institute! Rohan Choudhury Siva Kailas Seth Karten Winnie Kuang Gabrielle Ohlson Jinhyung Park Neehar Peri Fausto Vega From NSF: The purpose of the NSF Graduate Research Fellowship Program (GRFP) is to ensure the quality, vitality, and diversity of the [...]
Howie Choset has been named the 2023 Inventor of the Year by the Pittsburgh Intellectual Property Law Association (PIPLA). The award is given to a scientist whose patented developments have been economically significant and/or made positive contributions to society. PIPLA is one of the nation’s oldest organizations dedicated to fostering collegial exchanges regarding the nuances [...]
Artificial intelligence tools have increasingly aided emergency managers, public health officials and other professionals tasked with making critical and timely decisions that directly impact society. During disasters, AI can help efficiently direct and allocate resources. Likewise, AI tools help public health officials, community workers and clinics better target interventions to improve health outcomes. The advancement [...]
One day recently, on a table in Jean Oh’s lab in the Squirrel Hill neighborhood of Pittsburgh, a robot arm was busy at a canvas. Slowly, as if the air were viscous, it dipped a brush into a pool of light gray paint on a palette, swung around and stroked the canvas, leaving an inch-long [...]
PITTSBURGH (KDKA) — One day after NASA announced the crew that'll return to the moon on an orbital flight comes a big announcement from Carnegie Mellon University. CMU says it has finalized plans to put a rover on the moon. When it comes to lunar rovers, America's been there and done that. The Apollo missions [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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.
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; [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
Carnegie Mellon University's Iris rover is bolted in and ready for its journey to the moon. The tiny rover passed a huge milestone on Wednesday, Dec. 1, when it was secured to one of the payload decks of Astrobotic's Peregrine Lunar Lander, which will deliver it to the moon next year. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XdwWIVZgC0k "It is [...]
The DARPA Subterranean or “SubT” Challenge seeks novel approaches to rapidly map, navigate, and search underground environments during time-sensitive combat operations or disaster response scenarios. Team Explorer will be updating their blog over the next few critical days of the final event. Coverage will also be streamed from the Darpa SubT TV Site . [...]
Researchers from Carnegie Mellon University, the University of California, Berkeley, and Facebook AI didn't just teach a robot to walk — they taught it how to learn to walk. The distinction is key. A major hurdle to deploying legged robots, whether with two, four or even more legs, is figuring out how the robot will [...]
Manuela Veloso, a renowned artificial intelligence researcher, computer scientist and roboticist at Carnegie Mellon University, is among the most influential women in engineering, according to a new list compiled by Academic Influence. The list of women includes astronauts, founders and CEOs of well-known technology and Fortune 500 companies, a Nobel laureate, and researchers from around [...]
Robotics Institute PhD students, Keene Chin, Victoria Dean and Jason Zhang, are amongst the 2020 National Science Foundation's Graduate Research Fellowship Program Recipients. The NSF GRFP recognizes and supports outstanding graduate students in NSF-supported STEM disciplines who are pursuing research-based master's and doctoral degrees. Keene Chin, Victoria Dean and Jason Zhang Keene Chin is [...]
https://www.scs.cmu.edu/news/temel-selected-wef-young-scientist
Carnegie Mellon University students who designed and built a small, boxy robot, called Iris, have achieved a major milestone: their robot passed its critical design review by NASA and is on track to land on the moon in the fall of 2021. “We are moving forward... we’re going to the moon,” a triumphant project manager, [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
Carnegie Mellon, Oregon State Robotics Team Prepares for Subterranean Challenge PITTSBURGH—A pair of wheeled robots and a pair of drones, assembled by researchers at Carnegie Mellon University and Oregon State University, will work together to autonomously map and search an underground mine as competition begins this week in the $2 million DARPA Subterranean Challenge. The [...]
Recently published work, "Autonomous Aerial Cinematography In Unstructured Environments With Artistic Decision-Making", outlines a flying robotic system for filmmaking with creativity firmly in the driver's seat. From the paper: Aerial cinematography is revolutionizing industries that require live and dynamic camera viewpoints such as entertainment, sports, and security. However, safely piloting a drone while filming a [...]
Vidya Narayanan (CSD) and collaborator Kui Wu (University of Utah) will present the CMU Textiles Lab paper "Visual Knitting Machine Programming" at SIGGRAPH in Los Angeles. The paper will be part of the "Textiles and Fabrication" session on Tuesday July 30th from 2pm-3:30pm The paper demonstrates a new data structure, the augmented stitch mesh, and [...]
James McCann is running a SIGGRAPH Frontiers workshop titled "Textiles: Virtual to Actual" at SIGGRAPH in Los Angeles. The workshop will be from 9am to 5pm on Sunday, July 28th [https://s2019.siggraph.org/conference/programs-events/organization-events/frontiers-workshops/textiles-virtual-to-actual/?sess=sess301]. It features talks from folks in the textiles industry about what problems graphics may help them solve, and talks from folks in graphics who [...]
Carnegie Mellon's Changliu Liu talks cobot safety, the importance of having realistic expectations of what cobots can and can't do and her vision of a manufacturing world after cobots. Read the full interview here: https://blog.robotiq.com/the-cobot-experience-series-changliu-liu
Agreement Affirms Pittsburgh’s Status as the ‘Capital of Autonomy’ with CMU at the Center of the Growing Industry PITTSBURGH—Carnegie Mellon University and Argo AI today announced a five-year, $15 million sponsored research partnership under which the self-driving technology company will fund research into advanced perception and next-generation decision-making algorithms for autonomous vehicles. Argo AI and [...]
PITTSBURGH—The University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine and Carnegie Mellon University each have been awarded four-year contracts totaling more than $7.2 million from the U.S. Department of Defense to create an autonomous trauma care system that fits in a backpack and can treat and stabilize soldiers injured in remote locations. The goal of TRAuma Care [...]
This week at the Web4All Conference in San Francisco, Dragan Ahmetovic and Saki Asakawa presented the following papers: “Impact of Expertise on Interaction Preferences for Navigation Assistance of Visually Impaired Individuals” Dragan Ahmetovic, João Guerreiro, Eshed Ohn-Bar, Kris Kitani, Chieko Asakawa “An Independent and Interactive Museum Experience for Blind People” Saki Asakawa, João Guerreiro, Daisuke [...]
Team brings home two awards from Greater Pittsburgh Regional Girls of Steel 2019 The Girls of Steel, a robotics team sponsored by Carnegie Mellon University’s Field Robotics Center, won two awards at the FIRST Robotics Competition Greater Pittsburgh Regional, qualifying the team and its robot, Laika, for the finals in Detroit. The team [...]
Amy Sisk of Pittsburgh's NPR Station WESA, for State Impact Pennsylvania, produced a 4 minute piece featuring the voices of Red Whittaker, John Bares, Chuck Whittaker and Mike Pavelek. It tells the story that begins with the Three Mile Island accident in 1979 and the robots that went on to inspect the space in 1983 [...]
A new report by the Boston Consulting Group (BCG), co-authored by Robotics Professor Howie Choset, argues that a thriving domestic robotics industry will help to enhance America’s competitivenessin the global economy, especially now that tensions are rising over global trade. The report, available online, suggests that robotics would have the greatest impact in five sectors [...]
Renewed federal grant supports research on transportation for people with disabilities A 10-year partnership between Carnegie Mellon University and the University at Buffalo (UB), to advance physical access and public transportation for people with disabilities, has been extended for another five years. The two universities’ joint Rehabilitation Engineering Research Center (RERC) on Accessible Public Transportationhas [...]
AI Will Help Feed A Growing Planet By the year 2040, there will be more people on the planet than food to feed them. Researchers want to change that: a sustainable solution to the emerging world food crisis is sprouting in an artificial intelligence (AI) lab in Carnegie Mellon University's Robotics Institute. Much more than [...]
Minh Vo and Aayush Bansal were among the winners of 2017 Qualcomm fellowships. Congratulations! The QInF program is focused on recognizing, rewarding, and mentoring innovative PhD students across a broad range of technical research areas, based on Qualcomm’s core values of innovation, execution and teamwork. QInF enables graduate students to be mentored by our engineers [...]
The National Academy of Engineering (NAE) has elected 84 new members and 22 foreign members, announced NAE President C.D. (Dan) Mote Jr. today. This brings the total U.S. membership to 2,281 and the number of foreign members to 249. Election to the National Academy of Engineering is among the highest professional distinctions accorded to an [...]
From IFT.org: Artur Dubrawski, director of the Auton Lab, Carnegie Mellon University, said that the lab researches new approaches to statistical data mining, specifically the underlying computer science, mathematics, statistics, and artificial intelligence of detection and exploitation of patterns in data. Government agencies routinely collect different kinds of data reflecting various issues regarding food safety, [...]
Cole Gleason, a Ph.D. student advised by Dr. Kris Kitani (RI) and Jeff Bigham (HCII), received a NSF GFRP fellowship. Cole's research focuses on developing navigation technology for people with visual impairments by combining computer vision and crowdsourcing. Full story here
Personal Object Recognizers for Blind People Receive Honorable Mention at CHI 2017[/caption] Robotics Institute faculty Kris Kitani and Chieko Asakawa in collaboration with Human-Computer Interaction Institute postdoctoral fellow Hernisa Kacorri and faculty Jeffrey Bigham received a Best Paper Honorable Mention for their project helping blind people identify objects at the ACM CHI Conference on Human [...]
