The Robotics Institute (RI) is a division of the School of Computer Science at

Carnegie Mellon University Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) is a private research university in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, United States. The institution was established in 1900 by Andrew Carnegie as the Carnegie Technical Schools. In 1912, it became the Carnegie Institu ...

Pittsburgh Pittsburgh ( ) is a city in Allegheny County, Pennsylvania, United States, and its county seat. It is the List of municipalities in Pennsylvania#Municipalities, second-most populous city in Pennsylvania (after Philadelphia) and the List of Un ...

Pennsylvania Pennsylvania, officially the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, is a U.S. state, state spanning the Mid-Atlantic (United States), Mid-Atlantic, Northeastern United States, Northeastern, Appalachian, and Great Lakes region, Great Lakes regions o ...

United States The United States of America (USA), also known as the United States (U.S.) or America, is a country primarily located in North America. It is a federal republic of 50 U.S. state, states and a federal capital district, Washington, D.C. The 48 ...

. A June 2014 article in ''Robotics Business Review'' magazine calls it "the world's best robotics research facility" and a "pacesetter in robotics research and education." The Robotics Institute focuses on bringing robotics into everyday activities. Its faculty members and graduate students examine a variety of fields, including space robotics, medical robotics, industrial systems, computer vision and artificial intelligence, and they develop a broad array of robotics systems and capabilities. Established in 1979 by

Raj Reddy Dabbala Rajagopal "Raj" Reddy (born 13 June 1937) is an Indian-American computer scientist and a winner of the Turing Award. He is one of the early pioneers of artificial intelligence and has served on the faculty of Stanford and Carnegie Mel ...

, the RI was the first robotics department at any U.S. university.Robotics Institute: About the Robotics Institute
In 1988, CMU became the first university in the world offering a Ph.D. in Robotics. In 2012, the faculty, staff, students and postdocs numbered over 500, and the RI annual budget exceeded $65M, making the RI one of the largest robotics research organizations in the world. The RI occupies facilities on the Carnegie Mellon main campus as well as in the Lawrenceville and Hazelwood neighborhoods of Pittsburgh, totaling almost 200,000 sq. ft of indoor space and 40 acres of outdoor test facilities.

Major centers

The National Robotics Engineering Center (NREC) was established in 1996 as the commercial arm of the RI, with the intention of applying robotic technology to commercial and defense applications. It has partnered with more than 300 companies such as

General Motors General Motors Company (GM) is an American Multinational corporation, multinational Automotive industry, automotive manufacturing company headquartered in Detroit, Michigan, United States. The company is most known for owning and manufacturing f ...

, GE Ventures,

Google Google LLC (, ) is an American multinational corporation and technology company focusing on online advertising, search engine technology, cloud computing, computer software, quantum computing, e-commerce, consumer electronics, and artificial ...

and

Apple An apple is a round, edible fruit produced by an apple tree (''Malus'' spp.). Fruit trees of the orchard or domestic apple (''Malus domestica''), the most widely grown in the genus, are agriculture, cultivated worldwide. The tree originated ...

, as well as with the

U.S. military The United States Armed Forces are the military forces of the United States. U.S. federal law names six armed forces: the Army, Marine Corps, Navy, Air Force, Space Force, and the Coast Guard. Since 1949, all of the armed forces, except th ...

. In September 2015, the NREC secured a $5.5 million gift from the car transport company,

Uber Uber Technologies, Inc. is an American multinational transportation company that provides Ridesharing company, ride-hailing services, courier services, food delivery, and freight transport. It is headquartered in San Francisco, California, a ...

, to support three robotics fellowships and research directed at developing safe,

self-driving cars A self-driving car, also known as an autonomous car (AC), driverless car, robotic car or robo-car, is a car that is capable of operating with reduced or no User input, human input. They are sometimes called robotaxi, robotaxis, though this te ...

. This donation was made roughly seven months after Uber poached 40 NREC scientists, including its director, Tony Stenz, and other key program leaders, while the two organizations closely collaborated on driverless technologies. The Field Robotics Center (FRC) has developed a number of significant robots, including

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and

H1ghlander H1ghlander is an autonomous vehicle. Created by Carnegie Mellon University's Red Team, it is a heavily modified 1999 HUMMER H1. It competed in the 2005 DARPA Grand Challenge. The sensors used by H1ghlander include LIDAR laser-ranging unit ...

, which finished second and third in the

2005 DARPA Grand Challenge The DARPA Grand Challenge is a prize competition for American autonomous vehicles, funded by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, the most prominent research organization of the United States Department of Defense. Congress has authorize ...

, and

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, which won the 2007 DARPA Grand Challenge.

Media coverage and awards

In his book ''Almost Human: Making Robots Think'', Lee Gutkind* describes the development of robots at the Robotics Institute, particularly focusing on the developers and describing field testing in remote locations. The robot HERB was featured in the "Oreo Separator" video series.Knife-wielding robot HERB separates Oreo cookies
/ref> RI robots and researchers have been featured in the

Scientific American Frontiers ''Scientific American Frontiers'' was an American science television program aired by PBS from 1990 to 2005. The show was a companion program to the ''Scientific American'' magazine, and primarily covered new technology and discoveries in science ...

episode "Natural Born Robots" and in multiple NPR radio segments.Robot Receptionist Dishes Directions and Attitude
/ref>Robo-cup
/ref>A Hall of Fame for Robots
/ref>Robot Road Test
/ref>
/ref> The Advanced Robotic Laser Coating Removal System (ARLCRS) won a 2013

Edison Award The Edison Award is an annual Dutch music prize awarded for outstanding achievements in the music industry. It is comparable to the American Grammy Award. The Edison award itself is a bronze replica of a statuette of Thomas Edison, designed by ...

gold award in the category of materials science processes.2013 Edison Award Winners
/ref>

Notable faculty (current and past)

* Chris Atkeson * Howie Choset * Matthew Johnson-Roberson *

Takeo Kanade is a Japanese computer scientist and one of the world's foremost researchers in computer vision. He is U.A. and Helen Whitaker Professor at Carnegie Mellon School of Computer Science. He has approximately 300 peer-reviewed academic publication ...

Pradeep Khosla Pradeep Kumar Khosla (born March 13, 1957) is an Indian-American computer scientist, currently serving as the eighth chancellor of the University of California, San Diego, since August 2012. He is also a former electrical engineering professor a ...

* Matt Mason *

Hans Moravec Hans Peter Moravec (born November 30, 1948, Kautzen, Austria) is a computer scientist and an adjunct faculty member at the Robotics Institute of Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, USA. He is known for his work on robotics, artificial inte ...

* Katia Sycara *

Sebastian Thrun Sebastian Thrun (born May 14, 1967) is a German-American entrepreneur, educator, and computer scientist. He is chief executive officer of Kitty Hawk Corporation, and chairman and co-founder of Udacity. Before that, he was a Google vice preside ...

* David Touretzky * Manuela Veloso * Red Whittaker * Jessica Hodgins

Patents

Field Robotics Center patentsNREC patents

References

External links

Robotics NewsRobotics Institute Official WebsiteTravel Channel showcase of the RIFRC Website
{{Authority control Schools and departments of Carnegie Mellon Robotics organizations 1979 in robotics Organizations established in 1979