Tag: CARNEGIE MELLON

Robots that take their inspiration from nature are an old hat, and it's hard to fault the engineers. Whether you're a firm believer in evolution or you're in camp I.D., there is no denying that nature is an efficient and elegant designer. Carnegie Mellon's Biorobotics Lab used snakes as the basis for their latest creation, and dubbed the slithering bot "Uncle Sam," most likely due to its red, ...

We don't want to insult any of our loyal readers when we say that water sculpture, in general, rarely attains an aesthetic value exceeding the fine objets available in your monthly SkyMall catalog. (Maybe you have one? Send pics!) Perhaps Peter Barnum, Srinivasa Narasimhan and Takeo Kanade -- researchers at Carnegie Mellon University -- also enjoy the aesthetic of cheaply produced, disco ...

While it might be overshadowed by the 2010 FIFA World Cup, the Robocup, a soccer tournament for robots, is also happening right now. According to Physorg, researchers from Carnegie Mellon University have developed a computer algorithm for the American robo-team that allows the bots to anticipate and predict how the ball will move around the pitch. The goal of the Robocup is for researchers to ...

Researchers at Carnegie Mellon University recently decided to start parsing Tweets, categorizing them by topic and measuring their sentiments, in a way similar to a recent exercise by HP Labs focusing on box office performance. The team was able to analyze this data and produce, in effect, public opinion polls without having to call (annoy) a single person. What's more, the results of this ...

A new device, developed by a team of researchers at Carnegie Mellon University's Human-Computer Interaction Institute, might wind up scratching an itch that cell phone users didn't even know they had. Or, at the least, it'll have them scratching a lot more often. The 'Scratch Input' uses the sound produced by scratching your fingernail across a surface -- wood, fabric, what have you -- to ...

We stopped by Carnegie-Mellon University in Pittsburgh last week to get a sneak peek at a couple of new toys from Bossa Nova Robotics. The upstart company hopes it has found a niche in the toy market with Prime-8 and Penbo, which are inexpensive consumer robots spawned from multi-million dollar robotics research at the university's Robotics Institute. "We have democratized robots," co-founder ...

Dr. Priya Narasimhan, a professor at Carnegie Mellon University, doesn't intend to put a single NFL referee out of work, but there's no doubt that the technology she's tinkering with could indeed have that effect. The prof and her students are developing sensor-laden footballs and gloves, both of which could eventually tell in real-time whether a ball bounced off the ground before being caught ...

We're always hearing about some fantastical, nigh-mythical creation that Carnegie Mellon University is in the midst of cobbling together from spare parts, crazy ideas, and pure, simple genius, so maybe we shouldn't be frothing over the new robotic truck they've partnered up with Caterpillar to create, but this one promises to be the "world's largest." Adapting software CMU used in the DARPA ...