AI & robotics

Photo illustration of how Lightsense LED array works to identify drones.

Making unmanned flight safe

05/01/16 — Responsible Robotics is creating new technologies that enable drone operators to easily comply with emerging Federal Aviation Administration regulations.

PiE brings robotics to budding young engineers

04/26/16 — Hundreds of Bay Area high school students gathered at the Lawrence Hall of Science over the weekend to pit robots they had built against one another in a competition hosted by Pioneers in Engineering (PiE), a Berkeley student mentorship program.

Robots that act differently when you’re around

04/19/16 The Atlantic — Roboticist Anca Dragan, head of Berkeley's Interactive Autonomy and Collaborative Technologies lab, is working on algorithms that can help robots coexist with people in the real world.

Arduino Day: Underwater robots, R/C trains and more

04/08/16 Make — Arduino’s founders and fans gathered at Jacobs Hall on April 2 for Arduino Day, a worldwide celebration of the open-source electronics platform that allowed makers and enthusiasts to show off their projects, share ideas and participate in workshops.

Automakers go back to school for self-driving cars

03/16/16 Bloomberg Business — Automakers Ford, Toyota and Volkswagen, along with electronic companies Nvidia, Samsung, Qualcomm and Panasonic, are collaborating to fund artificial intelligence research at UC Berkeley, hoping this DeepDrive alliance can help them build the brains behind self-driving cars.

Pieter Abbeel with the Baxter Research Robot

‘Deep learning’ – a giant step for robots

03/04/16 Berkeley Research — For 15 years, Berkeley robotics researcher Pieter Abbeel has been looking for ways to make robots learn. In 2010 he and his students programmed a robot to fold towels. Now, he's gotten robots to learn from their experience.

Inside the artificial intelligence revolution

02/29/16 Rolling Stone — A visit to Sutardja Dai Hall's "robot nursery school," where EECS professor Pieter Abbeel and colleagues are trying to teach robots to understand the world and think intelligently, kicks off a look at the potential and the perils of artificial intelligence.

Building a rescue roach

02/18/16 New York Times — Humans may never eliminate cockroaches, but they could learn enough from them to build robots that crawl through rubble to look for survivors or gather information after disasters, according to scientists at UC Berkeley's PolyPEDAL Lab.

UC Berkeley and SuitX team, winner of UAE AI and Robotics for Good Award

SuitX wins $1M at “Robotics for Good”

02/10/16 Cult of Android — The suitX team designing medical exoskeletons for children with cerebral palsy, led by mechanical engineering professor Homayoon Kazerooni, won the $1 million international grand prize at the “Robotics for Good” competition in Dubai.

Cockroach robot squeezes though cracks

02/08/16 — Berkeley robotics engineers hope their new cockroach-inspired bot will be able to crawl through tiny spaces to find people buried in the rubble of collapsed buildings.

The paralyzed can walk again with this super-light robotic exoskeleton

02/01/16 Fast Company — The Phoenix, a lightweight exoskeleton developed under the guidance of mechanical engineering professor Homayoon Kazerooni, can provide an affordable way to walk again.

Tester operating an industrial grinder while wearing an exoskeleton

I wore an exoskeleton that gave me super strength

01/26/16 Time — Ekso Bionics, which grew out of Berkeley Engineering's Robotic and Human Engineering Lab, is working on an exoskeleton that can help workers lift and use heavy power tools for long stretches of time by literally taking the weight off their backs.

Finding the solution by changing the problem

01/19/16 ZDNet — On their way to launching Ekso Bionics, engineers at Berkeley's Robotic and Human Engineering Lab faced problems with noise, smell and weight as they struggled to develop an exoskeleton for military use. They succeeded by inverting the problem - starting from scratch and viewing the project from a new angle.

Lavanya Jawaharlal on females of color in STEM

12/16/15 Blum Center — Mechanical engineering senior Lavanya Jawaharlal talks about her hopes that STEM Center USA, the nonprofit startup she founded with her sister, can help shatter the glass ceiling for women in STEM fields.

Tech titans create nonprofit to develop artificial intelligence

12/15/15 Bloomberg Business — A group of prominent Silicon Valley entrepreneurs has established a nonprofit organization to develop "digital intelligence" that will benefit humanity. “This collection of people is stunning,” said EECS professor and company adviser Pieter Abbeel, who said he expects the company's research and ideas to be “impressive and surprising.”

Cambridge launches new center to study AI and the future of intelligence

12/04/15 Phys.org — The University of Cambridge is establishing a new interdisciplinary research center to address technical, practical and philosophical questions related to artificial intelligence, thanks to a landmark grant of £10 million from the Leverhulme Trust. EECS professor Stuart Russell, a leading AI researcher at Berkeley Engineering, will collaborate on the project.

Berkeley drone researchers win Microsoft Hololens research grant

11/13/15 CITRIS — Three faculty members from the UC Berkeley Robotics and Intelligent Machines Lab have won one of five academic research grants from Microsoft Research. The research by Allen Y. Yang, Claire Tomlin and Dean Shankar Sastry will be supported by a team of EECS undergraduates from the Virtual Reality @ Berkeley Club.