Astrobotic Technology, a Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) spin-off company, has announced that Caterpillar Inc. will be a sponsor of its first robotic expedition to the lunar surface. The initial Astrobotic mission, Tranquility Trek, will revisit the Apollo 11 site in April 2013 with a five-foot tall, 160-lb. robot broadcasting 3D high-definition video. The mission will carry payloads to the Moon and convey the experience to the world via Internet video access.

Carnegie Mellon University’s Robotics Institute is offering a new master’s degree program in robotic systems development that will provide beginning and early-entry practicing professionals with the multidisciplinary skills and know-how needed to succeed in industry. Graduates of this program will be capable of operating at a higher technical/managerial level within a company, making them extremely desirable job candidates.

Researchers in the School of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University will join a five-year, $10 million initiative funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF) to create novel tools for evaluating social interactions and other behaviors that can be used in diagnosing or treating behavioral disorders such as autism.

Anton Chechetka, a Ph.D. student in the Robotics Institute, received the Best Student Paper Award at the International Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Statistics 2010 for his paper, “Focused Belief Propagation for Query-Specific Inference.”

Five students and recent alumni from Carnegie Mellon University worked with partners in Chittagong, Bangladesh, for 10 weeks this summer to develop an educational tool for enhancing English literacy among pre-college students and to determine features for a standalone Braille writing tutor for visually impaired students.

Astrobotic Technology, a Carnegie Mellon University spin-off company devoted to robotic exploration of the Moon, announced that it will pursue NASA’s offer to buy up to $10 million in data from a commercial lunar lander mission. The space agency's Innovative Lunar Demonstrations Data (ILDD) program has a total budget of $30 million.

Researchers in Carnegie Mellon University’s electric car conversion project, ChargeCar, have announced a contest to find the most efficient methods for managing power in their electric vehicles. The grand prize of the ChargeCarPrize contest is an electric car.

Three robots associated with the Robotics Institute and the Quality of Life Technology Center are included in Popular Science's August feature on "Rise of the Helpful Machines."

The Robotics Institute's National Robotics Engineering Center (NREC) and Shell Development Kashagan B.V., (SDK) are developing a human-sized, wheeled robot to perform simple inspection tasks of offshore oil and gas production facilities in the giant Kashagan field of the Caspian Sea.

A new four-year, $7 million educational initiative by Carnegie Mellon University will leverage students’ innate interest in robots and other forms of “hard fun” to increase U.S. enrollments in computer science and steer more young people into scientific and technological careers.