News
Can Artistry Be Built Into a Machine?
One day recently, on a table in Jean Oh’s lab in the Squirrel Hill neighborhood of Pittsburgh, a robot arm was busy at a canvas. Slowly, as if the air were viscous, it dipped a brush into a pool of light gray paint on a[...]
CMU Finalizes Plans to Put Rover on the Moon
PITTSBURGH (KDKA) — One day after NASA announced the crew that'll return to the moon on an orbital flight comes a big announcement from Carnegie Mellon University. CMU says it has finalized plans to put a rover on the moon. When it comes to lunar[...]
Congratulations Greg Armstrong and Brian Staszel – recipients of 2023 SCS Founders Day Awards
Service Award Recipient A. Nico Habermann Educational Service Award: Greg Armstrong - Senior Research Technician/AI Maker Space Manager, RI Staff Recognition Award Recipient Sustained Excellence: Brian Staszel, RI "...always does an extraordinary job...actions help RI achieve excellence every single day...creator and keeper of...excellence...the George Lucas[...]
Obituary: Alan Guisewite Was a Robotics Institute Factotum
Alan Guisewite, an operations assistant in the Robotics Institute for 40 years, died earlier this month. He was 74. His official title was operations assistant. But between his technical capabilities, institutional memory and seemingly comprehensive knowledge of building materials, Alan Guisewite was a veritable[...]
MRSD Team Pairs With Penguins on Autonomous Zamboni Machine
Robots in Carnegie Mellon University's Newell-Simon Hall can explore the moon, slither across the ground, crawl down pipes, and drive autonomously through deserts and cities. With the building's latest inhabitant, CMU researchers are putting autonomy to work on ice. A student team from Carnegie Mellon's[...]
Learning to Grasp the Ungraspable with Emergent Extrinsic Dexterity
Exciting new work from the R-Pad Lab's Wenxuan Zhou and David Held features a simple gripper that can solve more complex manipulation tasks if it can utilize the external environment such as pushing the object against the table or a vertical wall, known as "Extrinsic[...]