Another RI Spinoff, Roadbotics, Earns Runner-up Prize. The Surtrac intelligent traffic signaling system developed by the Robotics Institute and spun off as Rapid Flow Technologies is the winner of the Smart Cities Global Innovation Award for Mobility organized by France’s Le Monde newspaper. The leader of the Surtrac project, Stephen Smith, research professor of robotics, [...]

Zulhasnan Rafique, the Malaysian ambassador to the United States, gets a close look at the CHIMP robot at the National Robotics Engineering Center during a May 23 visit arranged by the U.S. State Department. U.S. State Department Brings Diplomats to Pittsburgh More than 30 ambassadors and their spouses visited the National Robotics Engineering [...]

A Robotics Institute student is one of two School of Computer Science students named recipients of 2017 NVIDIA Graduate Fellowships. The company sponsors the annual program to recognize and support excellence in computing research using graphics processing units. Ph.D. student Xiaolong Wang was among the 11 fellows in the 2017 class, along with Adams Wei [...]

Now On Display at Chicago’s Museum of Science and Industry Daisy, a six-legged robot built by a Robotics Institute spinoff company, is one of several new robots featured in “Robot Revolution,” an exhibit at Chicago’s Museum of Science and Industry that runs through Feb. 4, 2018. Daisy is a hexapod robot that moves with a [...]

The smartphone app for navigating the blind, NavCog, developed jointly by CMU and IBM was field tested in Mitsui Fudosan’s COREDO Muromachi shopping park in Tokyo, Japan. NavCog was developed by the Robotic Institute's Cognitive Assistance Lab (CAL) led by Chieko Asakawa (Distinguished Service Professor) and Kris Kitani (Assistant Research Professor). CMU-IBM Smartphone App NavCog [...]

The NavCog project of the Cognitive Assistance Lab) received the best technical paper award at the 14th International Web for All Conference in Perth, Australia with the paper "Achieving Practical and Accurate Indoor Navigation for People with Visual Impairments". Congratulations to the authors, Dragan Ahmetovic, Masayuki Murata, Cole Gleason, Erin Brady, Hironobu Takagi, Kris Kitani [...]

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 [...]