Category Archives: Robotics

DARPA Selects Tartan Rescue Team For Robotics Challenge Funding

The Tartan Rescue Team from Carnegie Mellon University’s National Robotics Engineering Center ranked third among teams competing in the DARPA Robotics Challenge Trials this weekend in Homestead, Fla., and was selected by the agency as one of eight teams eligible for DARPA funding to prepare for next December’s Finals.

The team’s four-limbed CMU Highly Intelligent Mobile Platform, or CHIMP, robot scored 18 out of a possible 32 points during the two-day Trials. It demonstrated its ability to perform such tasks as removing debris, cutting a
hole through a wall and closing a series of valves.

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency is sponsoring the DARPA Robotics Challenge (DRC) to spur development of robotic technologies that could be used to respond to natural or man-made disasters in environments engineered for humans, such as the Fukushima nuclear power plant crisis of 2011.

Sixteen teams competed at the Trials. DARPA on Saturday announced it would enter into funding negotiations with Tartan Rescue and seven other teams, who tallied the highest scores during the Trials. Gill Pratt, DARPA’s program manager for the DRC, said the agency has $8 million budgeted for the teams and intends to spread the money evenly between them.

Robotics Institute Startup Supports Computer Science Education Week

BirdBrain Technologies, a Carnegie Mellon University startup, has released a flock of its Finch robots for Computer Science Education Week, Dec. 9–15. Developed at the Robotics Institute, the low-cost, tabletop robots are on loan to educators across the U.S. who are using them to help get kids excited about computer programming.

Designed for an engaging introduction to the art of programming, the Finch can support more than a dozen programming languages and environments, and are appropriate for students as young as eight years old.

With on-board features such as sensors, motors, accelerometers, a buzzer, a full-color beak LED and a USB port, the Finch allows for students to write richly interactive programs.

Tom Lauwers (E’03, CS’06, CS’10), who founded BirdBrain in 2010, said the loan program is meant to introduce computer science and programming to fourth through ninth graders.

CHIMP Robot Prepares For DARPA Robotics Challenge Trials

It’s only been a few weeks since Carnegie Mellon University’s National Robotics Engineering Center (NREC) completed assembly of its four-limbed CHIMP robot, but the Tartan Rescue Team has high hopes for the robot’s performance at the DARPA Robotics Challenge (DRC) Trials Dec. 20-21. “We’ve been on a fast track for the past year, doing detailed design and development of CHIMP at the same time as we were writing and testing its software on surrogate hardware,” said Tony Stentz, NREC director and leader of the Tartan Rescue Team. “That’s an aggressive approach to producing a robot unlike any we have built and not without risk, but it appears to be paying off.

“The software allowed us to investigate a number of issues that influenced the design of the hardware and improved the robot,” he continued. “Even though we would love to have more time to practice with CHIMP prior to the trials, we’ve been pleased so far with its performance.”

Tartan Rescue is one of 17 teams competing at the DRC Trials at the Homestead-Miami Speedway in Homestead, Fla. Sponsored by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), the DRC is intended to spur development of advanced robots that can mitigate disasters while working in environments engineered for people. Based on performance at the trials, up to eight teams will receive DARPA funding to help prepare for the DRC Finals next December.

Robotics Institute Computer Teaches Itself Common Sense

A computer program called the Never Ending Image Learner (NEIL) is running 24 hours a day at Carnegie Mellon University, searching the Web for images, doing its best to understand them on its own and, as it builds a growing visual database, gathering common sense on a massive scale.

NEIL leverages recent advances in computer vision that enable computer programs to identify and label objects in images, to characterize scenes and to recognize attributes, such as colors, lighting and materials, all with a minimum of human supervision. In turn, the data it generates will further enhance the ability of computers to understand the visual world.

But NEIL also makes associations between these things to obtain common sense information that people just seem to know without ever saying — that cars often are found on roads, that buildings tend to be vertical and that ducks look sort of like geese. Based on text references, it might seem that the color associated with sheep is black, but people — and NEIL — nevertheless know that sheep typically are white.

“Images are the best way to learn visual properties,” said Abhinav Gupta, assistant research professor in Carnegie Mellon’s Robotics Institute. “Images also include a lot of common sense information about the world. People learn this by themselves and, with NEIL, we hope that computers will do so as well.”

Curiosity Completes Drive Using CMU Navigation Software

Using autonomous navigation software first developed at Carnegie Mellon University’s Robotics Institute, NASA’s Mars rover Curiosity this week completed its first two-day autonomous drive, a new technique that enables the mobile laboratory to cover ground faster.

Since July, Curiosity has been on a 5.3-mile trek from where it worked for the first half of 2013 to the lower reaches of Mount Sharp, a 3.4-mile-high peak within the Gale Crater that is the rover’s next major science destination. Autonomous navigation software can quicken the pace by allowing the rover to safely drive itself across terrain not previously evaluated by human rover drivers on Earth.

“Autonomous navigation already has made it possible for the rover to extend its range each day, continuing to operate beyond the area we have been able to evaluate in advance,” said Maimone, who earned his Ph.D. in computer science at CMU and worked as a post-doctoral fellow at the Robotics Institute before joining JPL. “But what really matters is how far we can drive between planning cycles. Autonomous drives over multiple days will allow Curiosity to keep moving, even on weekends and holidays when staff members aren’t available.”

CMU Robotics Kits To Be Integrated Into Local Schools

An innovative program that introduces robotic technology into non-technical middle school classes will be used by suburban Pittsburgh and rural West Virginia schools in a federally funded research project to identify and nurture students with an affinity for science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM).

All 7th and 8th grade students at Springdale Junior-Senior High School and all 6th, 7th and 8th grade students in the Mingo County (WV) Schools — a total of 900 children annually — will use robotic kits developed at Carnegie Mellon University. They will use the kits to complete at least one project or assignment each year in required courses such as health, earth science and language arts.

The three-year Creative Robotics project, supported by a $1.5 million National Science Foundation grant, seeks to increase the number and diversity of students in the STEM education pipeline.

CMU’s CHIMP Will Compete in DARPA Robotics Challenge Trials

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) today announced that a team from Carnegie Mellon University’s National Robotics Engineering Center (NREC) is one of six Track A teams chosen to compete this December in trials for the DARPA Robotics Challenge.

DARPA announced the trials will be Dec. 20-21 at the Homestead-Miami Speedway in Florida and will be open to the public.

The NREC team is now assembling its four-limbed robot, called the CMU Highly Intelligent Mobile Platform, or CHIMP. The human-size robot is designed to perform tasks, such as climbing ladders, driving vehicles and closing valves that must be accomplished during the DARPA Robotics Challenge (DRC).

Former Robotics Faculty Member Doug James Wins Katayanagi Prize

Former Robotics Institute faculty member Doug L. James and Stanford University’s Pat Hanrahan, computer scientists whose innovations in computer graphics have enhanced such movies as “Avatar,” “Hugo,” “The Dark Knight,” “Finding Nemo” and “Star Trek,” are each recipients this year of Katayanagi Prizes in Computer Science.

The individual prizes honor the best and the brightest in the field of computer science and are presented by Carnegie Mellon University in cooperation with the Tokyo University of Technology (TUT). The prizes are endowed by Japanese entrepreneur and education advocate Koh Katayanagi, who founded TUT and several technical institutions in Japan.

BirdBrain Offers to Loan 1,000 Robots to K-12 Students

BirdBrain Technologies, a Pittsburgh startup that commercializes projects developed by Carnegie Mellon University’s CREATE Lab, will loan 1,000 of its Finch robots to school districts or educational groups during Computer Science Education Week (CSEdWeek), Dec. 8-14.

“We want to support Computer Science Education Week’s Hour of Code initiative, which seeks to demystify computer code with a one-hour introductory activity for 10 million students,” said Tom Lauwers, a Ph.D. graduate of the Robotics Institute and the founder of BirdBrain. “Finch was developed at the Robotics Institute specifically to make computer programming more compelling for novices, so we want to make the robots available to as many students as possible that week.”

BirdBrain will loan the robots to up to 20 school districts or educational organizations.

Romibo Robot Designed to Assist in Social Therapy

The Romibo Robot Project is an evolving robot for motivation, education and social therapy. Our project goal is to improve research techniques through the use of robots and social therapies. The robot has been designed around applications for individuals with conditions including autism, traumatic brain injury and dementia. Romibo includes features taken from other therapeutic robots currently used in research, such as Keepon, Pleo and Paro. The Romibo Project stands out by providing a low-cost development platform while providing the necessary features for use in a wide range of social therapies. The platform features a fully customizable design, allowing for individual creativity, ease of assembly and experimentation. Romibo is a social robot, able to convey emotions, communicate socially, and form relationships with individuals.