Carnegie Mellon University has brought its autonomous vehicle to Washington, D.C., to enable Congress to experience the technology up close and personal. CMU will provide up to 40 members of Congress the opportunity to ride the vehicle around Washington.

One lesson to be drawn from the stage debut of HERB, an acronym for Home Exploring Robot Butler, might be summarized by paraphrasing a legendary theatrical quote: “A system crash is easy. Comedy is hard.” The May 1 performance of David Ives’ “Sure Thing” by HERB and his human co-star, drama major Olivia Brown (A’15), was well-received by the audience. If not flawless, it at least generated laughs in all of the right places. But creating those 12 minutes of thespian magic in the Helen Wayne Rauh Studio Theatre required months of preparation by an ad hoc team of researchers and students from the Robotics Institute and the School of Drama.

LaunchCMU's latest cycle shone a bright light on how robotics technology originating at Carnegie Mellon University is making a successful impact in the marketplace. The Silicon Valley showcase of cutting-edge technology, research and innovation brought together venture capitalists, investment experts, CMU startups, faculty and alumni.

“Robogenesis,” the latest novel from Robotics Institute Ph.D. alumnus Daniel H. Wilson, the latest novel from Robotics Institute Ph.D. alumnus Daniel H. Wilson, has debuted to positive reviews, with Boing Boing describing it as “a terrifying and technologically rigorous sequel” to his earlier bestseller, “Robopocalypse.”

Carnegie Mellon University’s National Robotics Engineering Center (NREC) and Sikorsky Aircraft Corp. are working with the U.S. Army Tank Automotive Research, Development and Engineering Center (TARDEC) to show that an autonomous helicopter and a driverless ground vehicle can work together to autonomously survey a contaminated site.

Small, autonomous airboats, disguised to look like crocodiles, helped scientists measure water quality this spring in Kenya’s Mara River. An estimated 4,000 hippos use the river as a toilet with potentially deadly effects for fish living downriver. The airboats, developed by the Robotics Institute and operated by a CMU spinoff, Platypus LLC, skimmed over the surface of several hippopotamus pools in the river, where they scanned the river bottom for deposits of hippo dung and made various measurements of water quality.

Robotics Institute spin-off Astrobotic Technology will develop the capability to perform autonomous, controlled landings on the Moon, Mars, and asteroids under the terms of a new Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) contract with the National Aeronautics and Space Administration.

Five hundred Finch robots, developed by the Robotics Institute's CREATE Lab and marketed by BirdBrain Technologies, are now available for lending from the Chicago Public Library, thanks to a donation by Google Chicago in support of computer programming education.

Seegrid Corporation, the leader in vision-guided automated guided vehicles (AGVs), recently expanded its staff to meet product demand, hiring two Carnegie Mellon interns as full-time employees.

Students from five local high schools focused their cameras on classmates, teachers and communities to produce documentary videos addressing such topics as bullying, the role of technology in education and school rankings. The videos, produced through the Hear Me 101 project and three other community organizations, will be screened for the public at 6 p.m., May 22 at Pittsburgh Filmmakers Melwood Screening Room.