NRW2011: Robotics Institute

Just finished our adventure into the Pitt, and this time we decided not to walk from the train station to the CMU campus.

In addition to being famous for robots, PGH is also famous for its plethora of bridges.

Before heading over to the Robotics Institute at CMU we stopped by and checked out some of the Mobot races.

This farm bot is designed to work in an orchard where it can help with spraying and monitoring the condition of the crops.

Kids were having fun driving a snake bot along a series of pipes. The modular design can allow it to have different lengths for different tasks.

Even on earth this robot is so spacy.

Here is CMU's lunar X-Prize robot. It was interesting hearing about how much testing they did, and how they were able to use non-radiation hardened equipment by using redundancy, consensus based computing and testing to ensure functionality. Also, if you are interested in radiation hardened robotics this may be interesting.

A mine exploration robot for subterranean mapping.

I believe this one is used for sampling ice cores autonomously.

Autonomous robot boats for environmental monitoring.

Calliope is an educational robot designed to work with the Tekkotsu robotics framework.

We will be posting more photos and videos from Pittsburgh soon, in the mean time we will be at the Boston robot block party later today. You can find more National Robotics Week events near you.