Lo and Behold, Reveries of the Connected World, Werner Herzog’s new documentary featuring several Carnegie Mellon researchers and projects, will be screened by Pittsburgh Filmmakers at the Regent Square Theater at 7:30 p.m. July 29. Three of the researchers in the film – NREC’s Mike Vande Weghe, ECE’s Raj Rajkumar, and Psychology’s Marcel Just – [...]

The Inamori Foundation has named Takeo Kanade, the U.A. and Helen Whitaker University Professor of Robotics and Computer Science, as the winner of the prestigious 2016 Kyoto Prize for Advanced Technology, citing his pioneering contributions to computer vision and robotics. The international award is presented to individuals who have contributed significantly to the scientific, cultural [...]

Could a tail have allowed ancient vertebrates to make the transition from water to land? Researchers from Georgia Institute of Technology, Carnegie Mellon University, Clemson University and the National Institute for Mathematical and Biological Synthesis report in the journal Science this week on the results of a groundbreaking study to answer this question using amphibious [...]

The development of an electronic Braille writing tutor at a school for the blind in India has been a labor of love over the past decade for M. Bernardine Dias and her Carnegie Mellon University colleagues, students and staff. And for the past year, it has provided a research window into the role love plays [...]

The Girls of Steel team sponsored by the Field Robotics Center hosted more than 70 middle school girls on campus for the “Aspiring Young Women in Robotics and STEM” symposium, which included a speaker series, workshops, robot demonstrations, and a tour May 22. Participants hailed from 33 different schools from districts in Allegheny, Beaver, Washington, [...]

Clutter is a special challenge for robots, but new Carnegie Mellon University software is helping robots cope, whether they’re beating a path across the Moon or grabbing a milk jug from the back of the refrigerator. The software not only helped a robot deal efficiently with clutter, it surprisingly revealed the robot’s creativity in solving [...]

The RoboTutor project, which is developing educational software for teaching basic literacy and numeracy to children with little access to teachers, has received a ProSEED grant from Carnegie Mellon's Simon Initiative. Jack Mostow, emeritus research professor in the Robotics Institute, and Amy Ogan and John Stamper, both assistant professors in the Human-Computer Interaction Institute, are [...]

A team of Daniel Maturana and Sankalp Arora, both Ph.D. students in the Robotics Institute, was one of just eight nationwide to win a 2016 Qualcomm Innovation Fellowship. Each winning team receives $100,000 and will be mentored by Qualcomm engineers. The research proposal by Arora and Maturana, “Semantic Exploration Through UAVs,” was selected from among [...]

Navy tests sub-hunting drone ship.The U.S. Navy is developing an unmanned drone ship to track enemy submarines. The vessel is scheduled to be christened in April 2016. Source: CNN

The Robotics Institute’s Red Whittaker and the Andy lunar rover were on hand when Google, in partnership with Bad Robot and Epic Digital, premiered the new documentary series, Moon Shot at the SXSW festival in Austin, Texas, March 14. The series, including episode one featuring Red and Team Astrobotic, is available online for free. The [...]