Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) is a private research university in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. The institution was originally established in 1900 by Andrew Carnegie as the Carnegie Technical Schools. In 1912, it became the Carnegie Institute of Technology and began granting four-year degrees. In 1967, it became the current-day Carnegie Mellon University through its merger with the Mellon Institute of Industrial Research, founded in 1913 by Andrew Mellon and Richard B. Mellon and formerly a part of the University of Pittsburgh.
The School of Computer Science (SCS) at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, US is a school for computer science established in 1988. It has been consistently ranked among the top computer science programs over the decades. As of 2022 U.S. News & World Report ranks the graduate program as tied for second with Stanford University and University of California, Berkeley. It is ranked second in the United States on Computer Science Open Rankings, which combines scores from multiple independent rankings.
Crotalus cerastes, known as the sidewinder, horned rattlesnake or sidewinder rattlesnake, is a pit viper species belonging to the genus Crotalus, and is found in the desert regions of the Southwestern United States and northwestern Mexico. Like all other pit vipers, it is venomous. Three subspecies are currently recognized.
The Robotics Institute (RI) is a division of the School of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, United States. A June 2014, the article in Robotics Business Review magazine calls it "the world's best robotics research facility" and a "pacesetter in robotics research and education."
Sidewinding is a type of locomotion unique to snakes, used to move across loose or slippery substrates. It is most often used by the Saharan horned viper, Cerastes cerastes, the Mojave sidewinder rattlesnake, Crotalus cerastes, and the Namib desert sidewinding adder, Bitis peringueyi, to move across loose desert sands, and also by Homalopsine snakes in Southeast Asia to move across tidal mud flats. Any number of caenophidian snakes can be induced to sidewind on smooth surfaces, though the difficulty in getting them to do so and their proficiency at it vary greatly.
Robot locomotion is the collective name for the various methods that robots use to transport themselves from place to place.
Dragon Runner is a military robot built for urban combat. At 20 pounds (9 kg) it is light enough to be carried and thrown. The original project was funded by the United States Marine Corps Warfighting Laboratory in conjunction with Carnegie Mellon University. It was designed at Carnegie Mellon University while the electronics and thermoplastic shell is developed and made by QinetiQ, Inc. Early development was conducted by the United States Naval Research Laboratory, including initial design, production and field testing.
Terrestrial locomotion has evolved as animals adapted from aquatic to terrestrial environments. Locomotion on land raises different problems than that in water, with reduced friction being replaced by the increased effects of gravity.
BigDog is a dynamically stable quadruped military robot that was created in 2005 by Boston Dynamics with Foster-Miller, the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory, and the Harvard University Concord Field Station. It was funded by DARPA, but the project was shelved after the BigDog was deemed too loud for combat.
A ball balancing robot also known as a ballbot is a dynamically-stable mobile robot designed to balance on a single spherical wheel. Through its single contact point with the ground, a ballbot is omnidirectional and thus exceptionally agile, maneuverable and organic in motion compared to other ground vehicles. Its dynamic stability enables improved navigability in narrow, crowded and dynamic environments. The ballbot works on the same principle as that of an inverted pendulum.
A six-legged walking robot should not be confused with a Stewart platform, a kind of parallel manipulator used in robotics applications.
Modular self-reconfiguring robotic systems or self-reconfigurable modular robots are autonomous kinematic machines with variable morphology. Beyond conventional actuation, sensing and control typically found in fixed-morphology robots, self-reconfiguring robots are also able to deliberately change their own shape by rearranging the connectivity of their parts, in order to adapt to new circumstances, perform new tasks, or recover from damage.
A snake-arm robot is a slender hyper-redundant manipulator. The high number of degrees of freedom allows the arm to “snake” along a path or around an obstacle – hence the name “snake-arm”.
Legged robots are a type of mobile robot which use articulated limbs, such as leg mechanisms, to provide locomotion. They are more versatile than wheeled robots and can traverse many different terrains, though these advantages require increased complexity and power consumption. Legged robots often imitate legged animals, such as humans or insects, in an example of biomimicry.
Howie Choset is a professor at Carnegie Mellon University's Robotics Institute. His research includes snakebots, or robots designed in a segmented fashion to mimic snake-like actuation and motion, demining, and coverage. His snake robots have also been used in surgical applications for diagnosis and tumor removal; nuclear power plant inspection, archaeological excavations, manufacturing applications and understanding biological behaviors of a variety of animals.
Manuela Maria Veloso is the Head of J.P. Morgan AI Research & Herbert A. Simon University Professor Emeritus in the School of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University, where she was previously Head of the Machine Learning Department. She served as president of Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI) until 2014, and the co-founder and a Past President of the RoboCup Federation. She is a fellow of AAAI, Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), and Association for Computing Machinery (ACM). She is an international expert in artificial intelligence and robotics.
Matthew Thomas Mason is an American roboticist and the former Director of the Robotics Institute at Carnegie Mellon University. Mason is a researcher in the area of robotic manipulation, and is the author of two highly cited textbooks in the field.
Undulatory locomotion is the type of motion characterized by wave-like movement patterns that act to propel an animal forward. Examples of this type of gait include crawling in snakes, or swimming in the lamprey. Although this is typically the type of gait utilized by limbless animals, some creatures with limbs, such as the salamander, forgo use of their legs in certain environments and exhibit undulatory locomotion. In robotics this movement strategy is studied in order to create novel robotic devices capable of traversing a variety of environments.
Bio-inspired robotic locomotion is a fairly new subcategory of bio-inspired design. It is about learning concepts from nature and applying them to the design of real-world engineered systems. More specifically, this field is about making robots that are inspired by biological systems, including Biomimicry. Biomimicry is copying from nature while bio-inspired design is learning from nature and making a mechanism that is simpler and more effective than the system observed in nature. Biomimicry has led to the development of a different branch of robotics called soft robotics. The biological systems have been optimized for specific tasks according to their habitat. However, they are multifunctional and are not designed for only one specific functionality. Bio-inspired robotics is about studying biological systems, and looking for the mechanisms that may solve a problem in the engineering field. The designer should then try to simplify and enhance that mechanism for the specific task of interest. Bio-inspired roboticists are usually interested in biosensors, bioactuators, or biomaterials. Most of the robots have some type of locomotion system. Thus, in this article different modes of animal locomotion and few examples of the corresponding bio-inspired robots are introduced.
A robot fish is a type of bionic robot that has the shape and locomotion of a living fish. Most robot fish are designed to emulate living fish which use body-caudal fin (BCF) propulsion, and can be divided into three categories: single joint (SJ), multi-joint (MJ) and smart material-based "soft-body" design.
