The Tartan Rescue Team from Carnegie Mellon University’s National Robotics Engineering Center ranked third among teams competing in the DARPA Robotics Challenge Trials this weekend in Homestead, Fla., and was selected by the agency as one of eight teams eligible for DARPA funding to prepare for next December’s Finals.
The Tartan Rescue Team and its CHIMP robot will be Carnegie Mellon University’s most visible presence at the DARPA Robotics Challenge (DRC) Trials in Homestead, Fla., Dec. 20-21, but CMU also will play an important role on a second participant, Team WRECS, based at Worcester Polytechnic Institute (WPI). Chris Atkeson, professor of robotics, and 10 current or recent CMU grad students and postdocs, are part of WPI’s Robotics Engineering C Squad (WRECS).
Collaborative robots, or CoBots, developed by Manuela Veloso and her Carnegie Mellon research team, have been running errands for occupants of the Gates and Hillman centers for more than two years. Now, they are the subject of a “Science Nation” video and special report by the National Science Foundation.
It’s only been a few weeks since Carnegie Mellon University’s National Robotics Engineering Center (NREC) completed assembly of its four-limbed CHIMP robot, but the Tartan Rescue Team has high hopes for the robot’s performance at the DARPA Robotics Challenge (DRC) Trials Dec. 20-21. “We’ve been on a fast track for the past year, doing detailed design and development of CHIMP at the same time as we were writing and testing its software on surrogate hardware,” said Tony Stentz, NREC director and leader of the Tartan Rescue Team.
BirdBrain Technologies, a Carnegie Mellon University startup, has released a flock of its Finch robots for Computer Science Education Week, Dec. 9–15. Developed at the Robotics Institute, the low-cost, tabletop robots are on loan to educators across the U.S. who are using them to help get kids excited about computer programming.
The U.S. Department of Education is sponsoring a five-year, $3.7 million project led by Carnegie Mellon University to develop methods that enable people with disabilities to take full advantage of the resources available on the Internet.
A computer program called the Never Ending Image Learner (NEIL) is running 24 hours a day at Carnegie Mellon University, searching the Web for images, doing its best to understand them on its own and, as it builds a growing visual database, gathering common sense on a massive scale.
Anca Dragan, a Ph.D student in the Robotics Institute since 2009, is one of 15 U.S. students chosen for the 2013-2014 Intel PhD Fellowship Program. She is a member of the Personal Robotics Laboratory led by Sidd Srinivasa, associate professor of robotics.
Using autonomous navigation software first developed at Carnegie Mellon University’s Robotics Institute, NASA’s Mars rover Curiosity this week completed its first two-day autonomous drive, a new technique that enables the mobile laboratory to cover ground faster.
Manuela Veloso, professor of computer science, talked with the New York Times' John Markoff about her CoBots and how they are part of a new breed of robots built to interact with people. Markoff included her views in his article, "Marking Robots More Like Us."