Robotics Institute

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The Robotics Institute (RI) is a private nonprofit research institute at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh. It is an academic department inside CMU’s School of Computer Science and is widely regarded as one of the world’s top robotics research centers. RI is known for work in computer vision, autonomous vehicles, space exploration, disaster relief, and assistive robotics. It operates on CMU’s campus and in several Pittsburgh neighborhoods.

RI was the first academic department dedicated entirely to robotics. It was founded in 1979 by Raj Reddy and Angel Jordan with a $3 million grant from Westinghouse. Reddy led the institute from 1979 to 1991. In 1988, RI started the first Ph.D. program in robotics. In 2023, CMU became the first computer science school to offer an undergraduate robotics major.

The Robotics Institute hosts three research centers: the National Robotics Engineering Center (NREC), the Field Robotics Center (FRC), and the Extended Reality Technology Center (XRTC). NREC works with government and industry to apply robotic technologies to real-world tasks, including unmanned vehicles, sensing, machine learning, and human–robot interaction. FRC develops mobile robots for challenging field environments such as rugged terrain, agriculture, underground settings, and underwater work.

RI has a long history in self-driving research, starting with the Navlab project in the 1980s as part of the DARPA initiative. Navlab produced vehicles for various missions, including a famous cross-country drive in 1995. In the 2005 DARPA Grand Challenge, CMU’s Sandstorm and H1ghlander finished highly, and in 2007 the Tartan Racing team won with a modified SUV named Boss. More recently, RI teams competed in the DARPA Subterranean Challenge (2019–2021), winning the tunnel circuit and placing well overall.

In space robotics, CMU has built lunar rovers like Andy (2014) and Iris (2024), with Iris flying as part of the Peregrine mission before an issue prevented the lander from reaching theMoon. MoonRanger is planned for a Moon mission in 2029. Other notable RI projects include HERB, a household robot; NavCog, a navigation app for visually impaired people; soft robotics research that inspired Baymax from Big Hero 6; and CHIMP, a humanoid robot that finished well in the 2015 DARPA Robotics Challenge.