The autonomous, solar-powered Zoë, which became the first robot to map microbial life during a 2005 field expedition in Chile’s Atacama Desert, is heading back to the world’s driest desert this month on a NASA astrobiology mission led by Carnegie Mellon University and the SETI Institute. This time, Zoë is equipped with a one-meter drill to search for subsurface life.

As before, Zoë will be testing technologies and techniques that will be necessary for exploring life on Mars. NASA’s Curiosity rover is finding life-friendly areas on the Red Planet and the space agency now is deciding how best to equip a rover set to follow in Curiosity’s tracks in 2020.

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. The Track A teams, which are building their own robots for the competition, join seven previously announced Track B and C teams that will use humanoid robots supplied to them by DARPA. 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).

Anki, a robotics startup founded by a trio of Robotics Institute alumni, emerged from stealth mode to announce its first product during one of the highest profile events in the tech world: the keynote of Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference June 10 in San Francisco.

Anki, a robotics startup founded by Carnegie Mellon University alumni, emerged from stealth mode to announce its first product during one of the highest profile events in the tech world: the keynote of Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference, June 10 in San Francisco.

Boris Sofman, who received a Ph.D. from the Robotics Institute, led the demonstration of Anki Drive, an immersive racing game that features motorized cars with artificial intelligence.

The game goes on sale this fall, and the app is available at the iTunes Store.

The CMDragons, Carnegie Mellon University’s team in the RoboCup small-size league, performed impressively in the finals of the RoboCup 2013 world championship on June 30 in Eindhoven, The Netherlands, before finally falling to the ZJUNlict team from China’s Zhejiang University by the narrowest of margins in a shoot out.

Manuela Veloso, professor of computer science, said the team faced fierce competition not only in the final, but also in the quarter final and semi-final contests. In the final, the two teams were deadlocked, 2-2, at the end of regulation as well as following overtime play. In the shoot-out, the CMU robots scored on all but one of the penalty shots, giving Zheijiang a 7-6 edge.

“We came in second place, in the closest possible way to first,” Veloso said. “The team from China even asked us to go up on the stage together with them for the award ceremony.”

The team is led by Joydeep Biswas, a Robotics Institute Ph.D. student, and includes Juan Pablo Mendoza, also a robotics Ph.D. student; Danny Zhu, a Ph.D. student in the Computer Science Department, and computer science undergraduates Ben Choi, Steve Klee, and Alex Etling. Mike Licitra, formerly a senior engineer at NREC, provided the robots’ design and hardware.

Tests of a modular snake robot in an Austrian nuclear power plant proved the multi-jointed robot with a camera on its head can crawl through a variety of steam pipes and connecting vessels, suggesting it could be a valuable inspection tool, report researchers at Carnegie Mellon University’s Robotics Institute.

The snake robot was able to maneuver through multiple bends, slip through open valves and negotiate vessels with multiple openings. With a video camera and LED light on its head, the snake was able to peer into holes and get multiple views of items inside the pipes.

It would be impossible to compute all of the ways a piece of cloth might shift, fold and drape over a moving human figure. But after six months of computation, researchers at Carnegie Mellon University and the University of California, Berkeley, are pretty sure they’ve simulated almost every important configuration of that cloth.

“I believe our approach generates the most beautiful and realistic cloth of any real-time technique,” said Adrien Treuille, associate professor of computer science and robotics at Carnegie Mellon.

To create this cloth database, the team took advantage of the immense computing power available in the cloud, ultimately using 4,554 central processing unit (CPU) hours to generate 33 gigabytes of data.

“Do Robots Dream of Cookies?” a video starring the Robotics Institute’s HERB, the Home Exploring Robot Butler, won top honors at the Robot Film Festival July 20-21 in San Francisco.

The video features HERB’s newly acquired ability to separate Oreo cookies and was created as an online component of this year’s “Cookie vs. Creme” advertising campaign for the popular brand. Sidd Srinivasa, associate professor of robotics and head of the Personal Robotics Laboratory, and Pras Velagapudi, project scientist, had supporting roles.

The festival jury selected the video as the winner of the “Botsker” award for “Most Innovative Technology.” The theme of this year’s festival, “Form vs. Function,” made that a significant award, said Heather Knight, a Ph.D. student in robotics and the festival’s executive director.