The CREATE Lab’s Hear Me 101 project this summer helped Wilkinsburg students produce a short documentary, “Wilkinsburg: The Way We See It,” which the students will screen at 6 p.m. Monday at Hosanna House, 807 Wallace Ave., Wilkinsburg.
“Do Robots Dream of Cookies?” a video starring the Robotics Institute’s HERB, the Home Exploring Robot Butler, won top honors at the Robot Film Festival July 20-21 in San Francisco. The video features HERB’s newly acquired ability to separate Oreo cookies and was created as an online component of this year’s “Cookie vs. Creme” advertising campaign for the popular brand.
It would be impossible to compute all of the ways a piece of cloth might shift, fold and drape over a moving human figure. But after six months of computation, researchers at Carnegie Mellon University and the University of California, Berkeley, are pretty sure they’ve simulated almost every important configuration of that cloth. This presents a new paradigm for computer graphics, in which it will be possible to provide real-time simulation for virtually any complex phenomenon, whether it’s a naturally flowing robe or a team of galloping horses.
The fingers of thousands of people who created sketches of Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie on their iPhones can collectively guide and correct the drawing strokes of subsequent touchscreen users in an application created by researchers at Carnegie Mellon University and Microsoft Research. The app compensates for the “fat finger” problem associated with touchscreens, automatically correcting a person’s drawing strokes while preserving the user’s artistic style.
The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) today announced that a team from Carnegie Mellon University’s National Robotics Engineering Center (NREC) is one of six Track A teams chosen to compete this December in trials for the DARPA Robotics Challenge. DARPA announced the trials will be Dec. 20-21 at the Homestead-Miami Speedway in Florida and will be open to the public.
Tests of a modular snake robot in an Austrian nuclear power plant proved the multi-jointed robot with a camera on its head can crawl through a variety of steam pipes and connecting vessels, suggesting it could be a valuable inspection tool, report researchers at Carnegie Mellon University’s Robotics Institute. The snake robot was able to maneuver through multiple bends, slip through open valves and negotiate vessels with multiple openings. With a video camera and LED light on its head, the snake was able to peer into holes and get multiple views of items inside the pipes.
The CMDragons, Carnegie Mellon University’s team in the RoboCup small-size league, performed impressively in the finals of the RoboCup 2013 world championship on June 30 in Eindhoven, The Netherlands, before finally falling to the ZJUNlict team from China’s Zhejiang University by the narrowest of margins in a shoot out.
Blue Belt Technologies, a Carnegie Mellon spinoff that includes a number of School of Computer Science alumni and faculty members, has received FDA clearance to market its NavioPFS™ orthopedic surgical system. It is the first spinoff of the Center for Technology Transfer and Enterprise Creations (CTTEC) to receive such clearance.
Anki, a robotics startup founded by a trio of Robotics Institute alumni, emerged from stealth mode to announce its first product during one of the highest profile events in the tech world: the keynote of Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference June 10 in San Francisco.
The autonomous, solar-powered Zoë, which became the first robot to map microbial life during a 2005 field expedition in Chile’s Atacama Desert, is heading back to the world’s driest desert this month on a NASA astrobiology mission led by Carnegie Mellon University and the SETI Institute. This time, Zoë is equipped with a one-meter drill to search for subsurface life.