Carnegie Mellon University spin-off Astrobotic Technology was awarded a $10 million contract through NASA’s Innovative Lunar Demonstrations Data (ILDD) program for data to be gathered before and during the company’s April 2013 robotic expedition to the Moon. Read the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette's coverage of the Astrobotic team.

Mark Palatucci, a PhD student in the Robotics Institute, and Olatunji Ruwase, a PhD student in the Computer Science Department, are among 27 winners of prestigious 2010 Intel PhD Fellowships.

Carnegie Mellon University’s TechBridgeWorld program has publicly released the hardware specifications and software for its Braille Writing Tutor, an innovative device that helps visually impaired students learn the tricky task of writing Braille letters with a traditional slate and stylus. The specifications and software for the second generation of the device have been released under an MIT open source license and are available for download at http://sourceforge.net/projects/tbwbrailletutor/.

Comedian Stephen Colbert turned his satiric eye on robots, including Howie Choset's Snakebot, on the Sept. 30 edition of Comedy Central's "The Colbert Report." See the clip.

A “bait ball” of salema fish swirling off the Galapagos Islands, one of the world’s largest Adelie penguin colonies basking on an Antarctic beach and ancient petroglyphs in northern Saudi Arabia depicting hunters and their prey are three of the arresting scientific panoramas selected for a juried gallery show in conjunction with the Fine International Conference on Gigapixel Imagery for Science, Nov. 11-13.

The Pittsburgh Gigapanorama Project, which produced a humungous 360-degree portrait of Pittsburgh last fall from atop the U.S. Steel Tower, is doing it again between 11 a.m. and 3 p.m. Thursday, Sept. 23. People are invited to study last year’s Gigapanorama and find a spot where they would like to pose for this year’s image wearing whatever colorful clothing or outlandish costume they think might help them stand out.

Computer vision systems can struggle to make sense of a single image, but a new method devised by computer scientists at Carnegie Mellon University enables computers to gain a deeper understanding of an image by reasoning about the physical constraints of the scene.

Scientists who are pioneering the use of gigapixel imagery will discuss how they are leveraging this new technology Nov. 11-13 at the first Fine International Conference on Gigapixel Imaging for Science, hosted by Carnegie Mellon University. The deadline for early conference registration is Sept. 13. To register online and to view the latest program schedule, visit the conference website>.

Data gathering for the U.S. 2010 Census may be finished, but it has just begun for the Robot Census 2010. Heather Knight, a first-year PhD student in the Robotics Institute, has launched the unprecedented effort to count every robot residing in Carnegie Mellon University’s laboratories.

Carnegie Mellon University announces the launch of a new firm, Carnegie Robotics LLC, which will develop, manufacture and service robotic components and systems in partnership with the university’s highly successful National Robotics Engineering Center (NREC).