AI & robotics

So, where are my robot servants?

05/29/14 IEEE Spectrum — Four years after Berkeley engineers' video of a towel-folding robot went viral, IEEE Spectrum ponders what it will take to develop robots that can become true helpers and companions in people's homes. Berkeley roboticist Ken Goldberg says he doubts that ever-smarter machines will replace human contact, “but people aren't always available.”

Science Goes to the Movies: ‘Transcendence’

05/12/14 National Public Radio — In a conversation with NPR's Science Friday, EECS professor Stuart Russell explains what it would take to “upload” a mind to the Internet, and what is really worrisome about strong artificial intelligence.

Art imitates academia

05/01/14 — EECS professors Jose Carmena and Michel Maharbiz served as technical consultants to Transcendence film director Wally Pfister and answered questions about the film at a campus screening.

Bot on a budget

05/01/14 — Lavanya Jawaharlal, with her sister Melissa, co-founded STEM Center USA and developed the affordable Pi-Bot robot kit to increase access to science, technology, engineering and math fields.

Neuroengineers bring science cred, Berkeley feel to ‘Transcendence’ film

04/18/14 — When Hollywood knocked on the doors of UC Berkeley engineering professors Michel Maharbiz and Jose Carmena, the researchers answered. Director Wally Pfister tapped the researchers' expertise in neural engineering and brain-machine interfaces during the filming of his movie, “Transcendence.”

What if robots had whiskers?

01/21/14 Berkeley Lab — Researchers with Berkeley Lab and Berkeley Engineering have created e-whiskers – highly sensitive tactile sensors made from carbon nanotubes and silver nanoparticles that should have a wide range of applications including advanced robotics, human-machine interfaces, and biological and environmental sensors.

Dreams of the world: Flight simulation of robotic birds

12/18/13 National Geographic — Cameron Rose, an EECS grad student whose research focuses on flapping-winged robots in flight, dreams of one day helping the field of robotics achieve "something even close to the level of maneuverability and control that animals possess," he told National Geographic. "I also dream to use my knowledge and passion for robotics to encourage other African American students to pursue similar paths."

Berkeley Engineering team builds lamp robot at hackathon

09/09/13 Daily Pennsylvanian — A reporter for the Daily Pennsylvanian student newspaper shadows four Berkeley Engineering students as they try repeat the Berkeley team's 2012 victory at the PennApps Hackathon, the largest such student-run event in the country.

Foundry@CITRIS startup aims to get out the (robotic) bugs

09/06/13 TC — Dash Robotics, one of the first projects to come through the Foundry@CITRIS, has created a low-cost “origami” robot that runs fast on six legs, weighs half an ounce, is controlled with a smartphone and can easily be built at home.

Berkeley’s little legged robots grow wings and tails

06/05/13 IEEE Spectrum — Berkeley Engineering students have been exploring what you can do when you give ground robots bio-inspired accessories, and they've got some little legged robots doing cool new stuff thanks to the addition of wings and tails.

‘Sprawl-Tuned’ insect bot skitters all over the place

02/22/13 IEEE Spectrum — Berkeley's Biomimetic Millisystems Lab has posted a video of a new, six-legged robot called STAR, for Sprawl-Tuned Autonomous Robot. The tiny mechanism can adapt its limbs to scramble over and under obstacles and run along smooth and rough surfaces.

Fastest-turning robot from EECS lab uses tail to take corners

01/29/13 New Scientist — A tail-swinging robot, developed by Nick Kohut and colleagues in Ron Fearing's Biomimetic Millisystems Lab, can turn precisely without slowing down, allowing it to corner more rapidly than any other legged robot to date. This video from New Scientist TV shows it in action.

Flexing fingers for micro-robotics

12/19/12 Berkeley Lab — Researchers with Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and Berkeley Engineering have developed an elegant and powerful new microscale actuator that can flex like a tiny beckoning finger in response to a small temperature variation

Personal robots moving closer to reality

11/28/12 CBS This Morning — Personal robots that can bake cookies, shoot pool and -- in the hands of EECS professor Pieter Abbeel -- fold laundry are evidence of a new generation in artificial intelligence, jump-started by a Silicon Valley tech company's PR2 robots.

Robotics spark youths’ math, science interests

05/20/12 San Francisco Examiner — Budget cuts have made it tough for public schools to provide much more than the basics, prompting fears that the next generation will lack knowledge of science, technology, engineering and math. But more students and educators in San Francisco are discovering that robotics competitions, such as the one sponsored by UC Berkeley's Pioneers in Engineering (PiE), are an appealing way to promote these so-called STEM fields. "Now, I think engineering isn't as hard or as impossible," said Andy Wong, robotics team captain at Galileo Academy of Science and Technology, which partnered with Balboa High School to win first place in this year's PiE competition.

Launching water monitoring sensor into the Sacramento River

Putting water online

05/01/12 — In spring 2012, the Floating Sensor Network project, led by associate professor of EECS Alexandre Bayen, launched a flotilla of 100 robots down the Sacramento River to provide data on water movement and pollutant spread.

Grad students Kevin Peterson and EECS professor Ron Fearing with DASH+Wings

Winging it

05/01/12 — A small, roach-like robot with plastic wings borrowed from a toy is providing important insights into the natural history of flight.

When the car is the driver

02/17/12 National Public Radio — This week the state of Nevada finalized new rules that will make it possible for robotic self-driving cars to receive their own special driving permits. Do people notice a self-driving car and gawk? "We get a lot of thumbs up," says Berkeley Engineering alum Anthony Levandowski (M.S.'03 IEOR), one of the leaders of Google's self-driving car project. Google's fleet of robotic cars has driven more than 200,000 miles over highways and city streets in California and Nevada.

Expanding the reach of robotics

11/29/11 — From flying and crawling through quake-ravaged wreckage to performing dexterous feats of minimally invasive surgery and enabling paraplegics to walk, the vision of what robots and intelligent machines can do has come a long way since I first began the robotics effort at Berkeley in 1983.

Mechanical flying cockroach unveiled at Cal lab

10/30/11 ABC News — Recently, the Department of Homeland Security issued a proposal for a disposable robot that could be used in search and rescue missions. This week, a lab at UC Berkeley unveiled a contender: a mechanical cockroach with wings. "What's really interesting here," says Ron Fearing, professor of electrical engineering and computer sciences, "is that we don't have things that fly really well, that fly like birds. And we don't have things that run really well, like a cockroach or a rat can. But combining the two, we can actually do more than with either of them by itself."