Hear that buzz? It's news about robotics and engineering innovation in Pennsylvania.
In recent weeks:
A robotic paint-stripping system, being developed for the Air Force by Carnegie Mellon University's National Robotics Engineering Center and Concurrent Technologies Corporation of Johnstown, was named gold winner in the material science category of the 2013 Edison Awards. The system uses high-powered lasers mounted on mobile robotic platforms to remove paint and coatings from aircraft.
NREC is building six autonomous mobile robots, each equipped with a high-power-laser coating remover developed by CTC. As part of a two-year project, the robots will be deployed in teams to remove paint and other coatings from aircraft at Hill Air Force Base in northern Utah. The lasers eliminate the needs for abrasives or chemical paint removers; the robots make it possible to automate and precisely control the stripping process.
Carnegie Mellon researchers are also at work on the Lifelong Robotic Object Discovery Process, which helps robots augment their “vision” with other information – an object's location, size, and shape and even whether it can be lifted – to recognize and understand objects. The team enabled a two-armed, mobile robot to use color video, a Kinect depth camera and non-visual information to discover more than 100 objects in a home-like laboratory, such as computer monitors, plants and food items. Eventually the technology could help people accomplish tasks of daily living as part of the Home-Exploring Robot Butler, with the quaint acronym HERB, being developed in conjunction with the University of Pittsburgh.
Thirteen Penn State teams took honors in semester-long, industry-sponsored engineering projects. Altogether, 163 projects by engineering undergraduates were judged at the 2013 Student Design Project Showcase. Three teams won first place in the Lockheed Martin Design Awards: “Project Assignment/Algorithm,” “Maximum Allowable Gasket Seating Surface Degradation Before Seal Failure” and “Robotic Parallel Bars Walking Device.” Six other teams took second and third-place honors. The Boeing Systems Engineering Award went to “Rotor Wake Survey.”
Sources: Carnegie Mellon; Penn State
Writer: Elise Vider
