Here's another extremely cool offshoot of the Carnegie Mellon Robotics Institute. Platypus LLC build autonomous robotic airboats that can be deployed for a wide range of usages including environmental data and monitoring hard-to-reach spots after natural disasters like flooding.

Football fans have become accustomed to viewing televised games from a dozen or more camera angles, but researchers at Carnegie Mellon University and the University of Electro-Communications (UEC) in Tokyo suggest another possible camera position: inside the ball itself. They have shown that a camera embedded in the side of a rubber-sheathed plastic foam football can record video while the ball is in flight that could give spectators a unique, ball’s-eye view of the playing field.

Takeo Kanade, one of the world’s foremost researchers in computer vision, spoke to students, faculty and the community as part of the A. Nico Habermann Distinguished Lecture Series in Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University in Qatar.

HERB, the Home Exploring Robot Butler, was among the first campus celebrities to shake hands with CMU President-elect Subra Suresh and his family at a Feb. 21 welcome reception in Rangos Hall. The Robotics Institute’s Personal Robotics Lab uses the two-armed HERB as a testbed for algorithms, software and other technology that will enable robots to perform challenging manipulation tasks in places where people live and work.

Heather Knight is accustomed to working with a 2-foot-tall, plastic-bodied humanoid robot named Data, a robot comedian that is part of her research on social robotics. As a contestant on a new Syfy series, however, she controls a much different beast: an 8-foot-tall fighting robot called Medieval. Made of steel and chain mail and brandishing a shield, Medieval is one of 12 robots built especially for Robot Combat League, which premieres at 10 p.m. ET on Feb. 26.

William “Red” Whittaker, director of Carnegie Mellon’s Field Robotics Center and CEO of Astrobotic Technology Inc., will lead a NASA-funded study to figure out how robots such as the Mars rover Curiosity can avoid getting stuck in sinking sand or similarly hazardous terrain.

Carnegie Mellon University has signed a five-year master agreement with one of the world’s largest mining companies, London-based Anglo American PLC, to develop robotic technologies for mining.

Bloomberg Businessweek ran a profile on Howie Choset, professor of robotics, and about his pioneering work in building snake-like robots. “He is pushing his robots to operate in environments robots traditionally couldn’t work in — sand, debris, rubble,” says Daniel Goldman, a physics and biology researcher at Georgia Institute of Technology and research collaborator with Choset.

The Robotics Institute's National Robotics Engineering Center is part of a team assembled by prime contractor Science Applications International Corporation (SAIC) to design, build and test an unmanned autonomous surface vessel that can track a diesel-electric submarine for months and over thousands of kilometers with minimal supervision. The SAIC has released a YouTube video showing how this new type of craft could be deployed.

A research team led by Andrew Schwartz, a professor of neurobiology at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine and an adjunct faculty member in the Carnegie Mellon Robotics Institute, has enabled a woman with longstanding quadriplegia to control a human-like robot arm using two electrodes implanted in her brain. Watch CBS's 60 Minutes report.