Trees, vegetation, rocks, unpredictable terrain and the lack of clearly-defined roads — or roads at all — won’t stop an autonomous, off-road vehicle developed by researchers at Carnegie Mellon University’s Robotics Institute. As self-driving taxis, trucks and other vehicles pop up on city streets and highways, challenges remain for autonomous vehicles designed for mining, search [...]
Researchers from the Human Computer Interaction Institute (HCII) and Robotics Institute (RI) at Carnegie Mellon University introduced a novel method for fabricating functional flat-to-shape objects using a computer-controlled sewing machine. The team includes Sapna Tayal, undergraduate student in the School of Design; Lea Albaugh, Mark Stehlik postdoctoral teaching fellow at HCII; James McCann, associate professor [...]
Robots with human-level dexterity have the potential to revolutionize object manipulation and reconstruction tasks, but achieving this level of dexterity comes with challenges, particularly when it comes to robots handling a wide variety of low-texture objects with high precision. To address this challenge and push the boundaries of current robotic tactile sensing, RI Ph.D student [...]
Howie Choset, Kavčić-Moura Professor of Computer Science at the Carnegie Mellon University Robotics Institute has been elected as a 2024 fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), the world’s largest general scientific society and publisher of the Science family of journals. Choset is being recognized for “distinguished contributions to the field [...]
Vivian Shen, Robotics Institute Ph.D. student, emerged as the champion of the Carnegie Mellon University Three Minute Thesis competition (3MT). The internationally recognized competition, hosted by Carnegie Mellon Libraries, challenges Ph.D. students from across the university to present their thesis in an accessible language in just three minutes. 3MT offers CMU doctoral candidates of any [...]
On Friday, March 7, the Textiles Lab at the Carnegie Mellon Robotics Institute, led by Associate Professor Jim McCann hosted a “Hard Textiles” lab jam. The lab jams show the unique ways textiles and technology interact, showcase the possible directions of future research and give the campus community an opportunity to see inside the lab [...]
Researchers at the Carnegie Mellon University Robotics Institute and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), created CHARCHA ( Computer Human Assessment for Recreating Characters with Human Actions), a secure and personalized verification protocol that allows an individual’s likeness to appear in generative video content. The team was inspired to create CHARCHA to respond to ethical issues [...]
Two faculty members in Carnegie Mellon University's School of Computer Science will receive Sloan Research Fellowships in 2025. Two faculty members in Carnegie Mellon University's School of Computer Science will receive Sloan Research Fellowships in 2025. Deepak Pathak and Zhihao Jia are among the 126 early career researchers announced as fellows. More than a thousand [...]
An aerial rescue vehicle developed by a team of students and faculty advisors at the Carnegie Mellon University Robotics Institute AirLab will advance to the next stage of the GoAERO Competition. The Tartan Air Rescue team and its TRAAV-160 flyer was named a Stage 1 winner of the competition along with 10 other teams. Tartan [...]
Tairan He, second-year Ph.D. student at the Carnegie Mellon University Robotics Institute has been awarded the 2025-2026 NVIDIA Graduate Fellowship. He will receive the prestigious fellowship alongside just 9 other students selected from applicants worldwide. For 24 years, NVIDIA has invited Ph.D. students to submit their research proposals for consideration, with a particular emphasis on [...]
An SCS researcher is using robotics to speed up e-waste recycling for flat-screen displays. A researcher from Carnegie Mellon University's School of Computer Science is using robotics to improve e-waste recycling. E-waste is one of the fastest-growing types of waste in the world, with an estimated 62 million tons produced in 2022 alone. [...]
The Center for Machine Learning and Health (CMLH) at Carnegie Mellon University recently announced the 2024 Generative AI in Healthcare Fellows. This round, two Robotics Institute Ph.D. students, Angela Chen and Bardienus (Bart) Duisterhof, earned their place among the seven recipients. Chen and Duisterhof both utilize artificial intelligence (AI) in unique ways to expand their [...]
Robots deployed in the home carry immense potential to improve people’s quality of life. Robots for cleaning, companionship, security, healthcare needs, and more can travel through home environments and assist with a multitude of tasks, making human-robot interaction an area of particular interest to many roboticists. However, despite the convenience of in-home robots, there lies [...]
Sheng-Yu Wang, fifth-year Ph.D. at the Carnegie Mellon University Robotics Institute. Sheng-Yu Wang, fifth-year Ph.D. student at the Carnegie Mellon University Robotics Institute, has received a Google Fellowship for his work in data attribution for text-to-image models. Wang is advised by Jun-Yan Zhu, assistant professor at the Robotics Institute. The Google Ph.D. Fellowship [...]
Researchers from the Resilient Intelligent Systems Lab (RISLab) at the Carnegie Mellon University Robotics Institute and the National Robotics and Engineering Center (NREC) have received the Best Paper Award at the IEEE Symposium on Safety, Security, and Rescue Robotics (SSRR) 2024 for their work titled Rapid quadrotor navigation in diverse environments using an onboard depth camera. SSRR hosts [...]
Takeo Kanade, professor of computer science and robotics at Carnegie Mellon University, has received the 2024 John Scott Award alongside two other world leaders in robotics research. The John Scott Award, established in 1815 by Scottish chemist and pharmacist John Scott to honor Benjamin Franklin, recognizes work that has reshaped the field of robotics and [...]
A research team at Carnegie Mellon teamed up with Meta FAIR, the University of California, Berkeley, Technical University Dresden in Germany and the Centre for Tactile Internet with Human-in-the-Loop (CeTI) to propose NeuralFeels, a machine learning model that combines vision and touch sensing on a robot hand to reconstruct and track unseen objects. Traditional sensing [...]
The framework allows the robot to create photorealistic scene representations in low-light environments. Robots lift heavy loads in warehouses, deliver meals to diners, and even tackle housework. However, a lot of robotic work goes unseen – quite literally. Robots and autonomous vehicles are routinely deployed for critical tasks such as exploration, inspection, transportation, [...]
2026 MRSD Swartz Fellows Abhishek Mathur and Gweneth Ge. MRSD students have many things in common. Hardworking, intelligent, and driven, students in the program continually stand out in their projects and industry knowledge that they apply both within and after their time in graduate school. However, several MRSD students share another thing in [...]
Jun-Yan Zhu, an Assistant Professor at the Robotics Institute in Carnegie Mellon University's School of Computer Science, has been selected as a 2024 Samsung AI Researcher of the Year. Samsung’s AI Researcher of the Year program recognizes five promising researchers under 35 who have made outstanding contributions to artificial intelligence research. The recipients receive $30,000 [...]
Team Chiron, a collaboration between researchers from CMU and the University of Pittsburgh, will compete in the second round of DARPA's Triage Challenge. Team Chiron, a collaboration between researchers from Carnegie Mellon University and the University of Pittsburgh, will compete in the second round of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency's (DARPA) Triage Challenge. [...]
Greg Armstrong (manager) and Leonardo Mouta (student worker) calibrate robots in the AI Maker Space. At the Carnegie Mellon University AI Maker Space, interdisciplinary collaboration thrives. Here, a biology student might work alongside a computer science major, while across the room, a business student brainstorms with an artist. The only prerequisite? Curiosity. In [...]
What if the future of energy could be as limitless as the stars? As nuclear fission powers today's reactors, researchers are looking toward nuclear fusion as a cleaner, safer, and long-lasting source of energy. Nuclear power plants are largely considered as one of the most reliable sources of energy. Inside the plants, reactors use fission [...]
Many people learn how to ride a bike at some point in their lives. When children are learning, adults can only guide them to a certain point. A large portion of developing this new skill depends on independent trial and error from the child. After days of practice, and perhaps a fall or two, children [...]
On Wednesday, Sept. 18, Google and Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai traveled to Carnegie Mellon University to tour research labs, talk with faculty and students about emerging technologies and officially kick off the first President’s Lecture Series event of the new academic year. Pichai’s whirlwind visit concluded in the newly constructed Highmark Center for Health and Wellness, [...]
Robotics Institute Raj Reddy Assistant Professor Deepak Pathak was named to MIT Technology Review’s list of 35 Innovators Under 35 for his work in self-supervised and adaptive robot learning. MIT’s list highlights emerging leaders who are using technology to tackle crucial problems we face as a society and exploring open scientific questions. Pathak works in [...]
Neural Motion Planning helps improve how robots react in new environments and perform tasks like removing a book from a shelf cluttered with other items. Humans can grab a book from a shelf with little obvious thought. But it's a complex process for the brain that involves planning and navigating around obstacles, like [...]
Twenty high school students gathered in huddles across a classroom, each hunched over a computer or fiddling with a small tri-legged robot. In one corner, students attempted to make the robot walk forward, laughing as it fell down after the first few steps. The students were eagerly preparing for the Feiyue Robotics Program showcase, held [...]
Motor impairments currently affect about 5 million people in the United States. Physically assistive robots not only have the potential to help these individuals with daily tasks, they can significantly increase independence, well-being, and quality of life. Large Language Models (LLMs) that can both comprehend and generate human language and code have been crucial to [...]
For a few hours on a Friday afternoon, a shrine stood in a lab at the end of a first-floor corridor in Wean Hall. Inside a nearly 9-foot tent, people solved four different puzzles to reveal words that they presented as offerings to automation and craft. One of those puzzles — and arguably the most [...]
The robot arm autonomously identifies an optimal stalk and follows a motion sequence to position the stalk inside the gripper. Corn is one of the most essential ingredients in global industry and agriculture. From tortillas, to ethanol, to starch, to alcohol, the plant remains a pillar in several production processes. Measuring the vitality [...]
Every second matters to emergency medical teams as they approach a mass casualty event and identify who needs immediate treatment. Breakthroughs in medical triage using robotics, artificial intelligence, drones and advanced sensing could save lives by directing medical personnel to people most in need of treatment. Team Chiron, made up of researchers from Carnegie Mellon [...]
From the hallways of hospitals to the farthest reaches of outer space, robots are transforming the way we interact with our world. In her new book “Robots,” Henny Admoni, associate professor at the Robotics Institute, takes young readers on a literary journey through the multiple ways robots can assist humans and shape our future. Neon [...]
Yuichi Hirose has a dream — a dream that someday everyone will have access to a machine capable of knitting furniture. This machine wouldn't just knit the furniture's exterior fabric, but would use knitting to fashion solid three-dimensional chairs, tables and other objects. Tired of that love seat? Just unravel it and reuse the yarn [...]
Robotics Institute researchers have developed a new method for autonomous aerial robot exploration and multirobot coordination inside abandoned buildings that could help first responders gather information and make better-informed decisions after a disaster. An estimated 100 earthquakes worldwide cause damage each year. This damage includes collapsed buildings, downed electrical lines and more. For first responders, [...]
Carnegie Mellon systems scientist Ji Zhang has received the prestigious Robotics: Science and Systems (RSS) 2024 Test of Time Award for his work on LOAM: Lidar Odometry and Mapping in Real-Time. RSS introduced the Test of Time Award to acknowledge papers published at least ten years ago that had the greatest impact on robotics design [...]
Computer science PhD student Bailey Miller and co-authors Hanyu Chen, Alice Lai, and Ioannis Gkioulekas have received an honorable mention for best student paper at the 2024 IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition, held in Seattle, Washington. Their paper, titled, “Objects as volumes: A stochastic geometry view of opaque solids,” develops a theory [...]
A research group at Carnegie Mellon University's Robotics Institute will soon host the CMU Vision-Language-Autonomy Challenge, bringing researchers together at the intersection of computer vision, natural language understanding, and navigation autonomy. The challenge aims to progress computer vision and AI-research in real-world systems. The team has created an award-winning navigation autonomy system over the last [...]
It's spring on the Carnegie Mellon University campus, and students divided into teams focused on communications, guidance navigation and control (GNC), and vision have their heads together trying to simulate how a satellite collects and transmits usable images. Across the room, their peers on the avionics team have laid out rows of circuit boards and [...]
SCS Founders University Professor Takeo Kanade will receive the BBVA (Banco Bilbao Vizcaya Argentaria) Foundation's Frontiers of Knowledge Award in Information and Communication Technologies for developing the mathematical foundations for computer vision and robot perception. Learn more and watch the livestream of the presentation ceremony from Bilbao, Spain via the BBVA Foundation's website on Thursday, [...]
Researchers at the Carnegie Mellon Robotics Institute have introduced a learning-based control framework called Agile But Safe (ABS). The framework– developed and programmed by Tairan He, Chong Zhang, Wenli Xiao, Guanqi He, Changliu Liu, Guanya Shi– enables quadrupedal robots to move in a collision-free manner in confined indoor and outdoor environments. When programmed with ABS, [...]
