Speck, a personal air pollution monitor introduced today at the SXSW Interactive Festival in Austin, Texas, will enable people to monitor the level of fine particulate matter suspended in the air inside their homes, helping them assess if their health is at risk. Developed at the Robotics Institute and now being marketed by a CMU spinoff company, Speck provides individuals with an unprecedented depth of knowledge about their personal exposure to particulates.

Illah Nourbakhsh says robots and artificial intelligence will increasingly displace people from many conventional jobs. It’s enough to make parents despair over their children’s career prospects, he acknowledged, and that’s why he’s publishing a pair of books, “Parenting for Technology Futures.”

A team of Carnegie Mellon University undergraduates is heading to California’s Mojave Desert this spring to flight test a sensor package they developed for analyzing large pits in the surface of the moon or Mars.

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency has qualified 14 additional teams, including competitors from Germany, Hong Kong, Italy, Japan, China and South Korea, to join teams from Carnegie Mellon University and elsewhere in the DARPA Robotics Challenge (DRC) Finals, June 5-6 in Pomona, Calif.

The IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation, or ICRA, is the world’s largest robotics conference and, like members of the robotics field, its organizers predominantly have been men. This year, however, the conference committee is composed entirely of women, with Carnegie Mellon University providing one of the largest contingents.

Astrobotic Technology, which is pursuing the Google Lunar XPrize together with Carnegie Mellon University, will not only deliver its own robot to the moon, but also a pair of rovers for Hakuto, the only Japanese team in the competition.

In a demonstration aboard a former U.S. Navy ship, a small quadrotor developed by researchers at Carnegie Mellon University’s Robotics Institute and spin-off company Sensible Machines flew autonomously through dark, smoke-filled compartments to map fires and locate victims.

Uber and Carnegie Mellon University have announced a strategic partnership that includes the creation of the Uber Advanced Technologies Center in Pittsburgh, near the CMU campus. The center will focus on the development of key long-term technologies that advance Uber’s mission of bringing safe, reliable transportation to everyone, everywhere.

The Google Lunar XPrize has awarded a $1 million Milestone Prize to Astrobotic Technology for achieving technical goals set for its lunar landing system. It is the third Milestone Prize awarded to the Astrobotic and Carnegie Mellon University team that is preparing to land its robot on the moon.

Carnegie Mellon University’s latest robot is called Snake Monster, however, with six legs, it looks more like an insect than a snake. But it really doesn’t matter what you call it, says its inventor, Howie Choset— the whole point of the project is to make modular robots that can easily be reconfigured to meet a user’s needs.