What a Perception System Doesn't See Can Help It Understand What It Sees                   PITTSBURGH—It's important that self-driving cars quickly detect other cars or pedestrians sharing the road. Researchers at Carnegie Mellon University have shown that they can significantly improve detection accuracy by helping the vehicle also [...]

              Nominated by: Jessica Kaminsky“ ...has initiated several study groups focused on building empathy, understanding gender and race, and examining the role of a university in community and system-level change...values justice, compassion, and dreaming...extremely high work ethic and commitment to execute projects with integrity.”   Watch Jessica make the [...]

  Visualizations Poised to Enrich Teaching, Scientific Communication   PITTSBURGH— Some people look at an equation and see a bunch of numbers and symbols; others see beauty. Thanks to a new tool created at Carnegie Mellon University, anyone can now translate the abstractions of mathematics into beautiful and instructive illustrations. The tool enables users to create [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]