Billboards typically help motorists find a place to eat, a car to buy or a politician to support. But a new billboard campaign in the Pittsburgh area, part of Carnegie Mellon University’s “Hear Me” project, is giving young people a new way to communicate about bullies, school and other topics important to them.

Armchair historians can interactively explore nine panoramas of Civil War sites in Gettysburg and other Pennsylvania locales featured in the July issue of GigaPan Magazine, an online publication of the CREATE Lab at Carnegie Mellon University’s Robotics Institute.

The Robot Film Festival in New York City July 16-17, directed by Robotics Institute PhD student Heather Knight, boasts a strong CMU presence with 10 films by students, faculty and staff.

The newly released 2010 Journal Citation Reports ranks the Journal of Field Robotics second among 17 robotics journals, based on the frequency with which an average article is cited. That frequency – the Impact Factor – was 3.580, compared to 4.095 for the top-ranked International Journal of Robotic Research. The Journal of Field Robotics was founded at the Robotics Institute in 2006 and is edited by Sanjiv Singh, research professor of robotics.

President Barack Obama came to the Robotics Institute’s National Robotics Engineering Center in Lawrenceville on Friday to launch a major manufacturing initiative, the Advanced Manufacturing Partnership. Part of the plan is a new National Robotics Initiative, in which the National Science Foundation, NASA, National Institutes of Health and the Department of Agriculture will make $70 million available to support research in next-generation robots. He also taped his weekly video address during his visit to NREC, including a mention of RedZone Robotics.

President Barack Obama will address the U.S. from Carnegie Mellon University's National Robotics Engineering Center (NREC) in Pittsburgh's Lawrenceville neighborhood on Friday, June 24. His speech will address the key roles that universities — in collaboration with government and industry — play in enhancing the global competitiveness of U.S. manufacturing, jumpstarting job creation and the process of bringing ideas to market.

Astrobotic Technology Inc. and Carnegie Mellon University researchers have completed structural assembly of the lunar landing craft that will deliver the Red Rover robot to the moon in 2014. The half-ton aluminum structure will now undergo shake testing to confirm its soundness and its compatibility with the SpaceX Falcon 9 launch vehicle.

Howie Choset, associate professor of robotics, and his snake robots were featured on a recent episode of the National Science Foundation's "Innovation Nation" video series.

Lee Gutkind, author of the 2007 book about the Robotics Institute, "Almost Human: Making Robots Think," discusses robotics and what he learned by watching and talking with Carnegie Mellon roboticists, in a videotaped lecture available on the AT&T Tech Channel.

William “Red” Whittaker’s contributions to the field of artificial intelligence through innovation and achievement in autonomous vehicle research, as signified by his team’s victory in the 2007 Urban Challenge robot race, have won him a share of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence’s (AAAI) inaugural Feigenbaum Prize.