Brian Ziebart Receives Richard King Mellon Foundation Fellowship

March 31, 2010

From CMU’s Website: Richard King Mellon Foundation Life Sciences What factors influence how well a teenager with Type 1 diabetes sticks to a medical regimen? Dianne Palladino, a first-year Ph.D. student in Carnegie Mellon’s Social and Health Psychology program, is working to find the answer. “I hope that my research eventually will be used to [...]

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Preprint: An Optimization Approach to Rough Terrain Locomotion

March 31, 2010

mzucker-icra10-9 We present a novel approach to legged locomotion over rough terrain that is thoroughly rooted in optimization. This approach relies on a hierarchy of fast, anytime algorithms to plan a set of footholds, along with the dynamic body motions required to execute them. Components within the planning framework coordinate to exchange plans, cost-to-go estimates, [...]

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Machine Learning for Automated Strawberry Sorting

December 30, 2009

PITTSBURGH—Researchers at Carnegie Mellon University’s National Robotics Engineering Center (NREC) have developed a plant-sorting machine that uses computer vision and machine learning to inspect and grade harvested strawberry plants and then mechanically sort them by quality – tasks that until now could only be done manually. In a successful field test this fall, the machine [...]

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Neato Robotics

December 21, 2009

Tony Stentz points out: The company “Neato” just went public with a product that competes with iRobot’s Roomba. Unlike the Roomba, which vacuums a room by driving mostly random patterns, the Neato robot uses a laser rangefinder to build a map of the floor layout, plan efficient coverage routes, and localize through registration. The ladar [...]

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Optimization and Learning for Rough-Terrain Legged Locomotion

December 12, 2009

Optimization and Learning for Rough-Terrain Legged Locomotion, Matt Zucker, Nathan Ratliff, Martin Stolle, Joel Chestnutt, J. Andrew Bagnell , Christopher G. Atkeson, James Kuffner. We present a novel approach to legged locomotion over rough terrain that is thoroughly rooted in optimization. This approach relies on a hierarchy of fast, anytime algorithms to plan a set [...]

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Learning Rough Terrain Outdoor Navigation

December 12, 2009

Learning Rough-Terrain Autonomous Navigation, by J. A. Bagnell, D. M. Bradley, D. Silver, B. Sofman, A. Stentz. Currently under review for Robotics and Automation Magazine. Autonomous navigation by a mobile robot through natural, unstructured terrain is one of the premier challenges in field robotics. The DARPA UPI program was tasked with advancing the state of [...]

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New Preprint

December 12, 2009

Anytime Online Novelty Detection for Vehicle Safeguarding, by Boris Sofman, J. A. Bagnell, and Anthony Stentz. Currently under review for ICRA 2010. We present an online novelty detection algorithm that allows a mobile robot to identify stimuli that are outside its experience base, avoiding potentially hazardous situations. This algorithm addresses many of the limitations of [...]

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RobotWhisperer

August 11, 2009

New website for the LAIRlab is up and running. Many changes are coming!

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