The Quality of Life Technology Center is hosting the First International Symposium on Quality of Life Technology June 30-July 1.

In what is becoming a Carnegie Mellon tradition, Jeff Baker, a research programmer in the Robotics Institute’s CREATE Lab, captured a GigaPan image of the university’s commencement ceremony. View it here, http://tinyurl.com/pn3m69, and be sure to create snapshots of any SCS students or faculty.

Matthew T. Mason, director of the Robotics Institute at Carnegie Mellon University, was presented the IEEE Robotics and Automation Society’s Pioneer Award at the International Conference on Robotics and Automation on May 16 in Kobe, Japan.

Carnegie Science Center and Carnegie Mellon University announced today the 2010 class of inductees into the Robot Hall of Fame® at a press preview of roboworld™, the Science Center’s new robotics exhibition opening June 13 and the permanent home for the Hall of Fame.

Red Rover, a prototype moon robot built at Carnegie Mellon University, will be available for public control April 18 from 11 to 1 on campus. Astrobotic Technology Inc., a university spinoff, plans to evolve this design into the winning entry in the $20 million Google Lunar X Prize for the first independent robot expedition to the moon.

Fifty computer kiosks in Chicago's O'Hare International Airport now enable travelers to experience Windy City places by exploring images created with GigaPan, a technology developed by the Robotics Institute and NASA.

Manuela M. Veloso, a professor of computer science at Carnegie Mellon University who studies how robots can learn, plan and work together to accomplish tasks, is the winner of the 2009 Autonomous Agents Research Award from the Association for Computing Machinery’s Special Interest Group on Artificial Intelligence (ACM/SIGART).

Small robots the size of riding mowers could prepare a safe landing site for NASA’s Moon outpost, according to a NASA-sponsored study prepared by Astrobotic Technology Inc. with technical assistance from Carnegie Mellon University’s Robotics Institute.

More than two dozen industry partners have joined with Carnegie Mellon University and other Pittsburgh-area universities and community colleges to create an associate degree program that will train technicians to build and maintain robots and other embedded computer systems, which have become ubiquitous in today’s world.

William L. “Red” Whittaker, Carnegie Mellon University’s Fredkin Research Professor of Robotics and chairman and chief technical officer of Astrobotic Technology, Inc., has been elected to the prestigious National Academy of Engineering (NAE).