AI & robotics

A pillow fight on auto-pilot

06/07/11 — The breezeway between McLaughlin and O'Brien halls looks like an electronic components store after an explosion. Color-coded wires, screwdrivers, white sprockets and power tools litter the floor-wherever there isn't a student standing, squatting or lying. In teams of fives and sixes, these local high school engineers are working hard to build robots for the final competition of Pioneers in Engineering (PiE), a robotics competition run by Berkeley Engineering students.

Microsoft’s Xbox Kinect beyond hackers, hobbyists

01/10/11 San Francisco Chronicle — Microsoft's Kinect, a motion-tracking peripheral for the Xbox console that is packed with an irresistible blend of cameras and sensors, is finding popularity among researchers such as UC Berkeley engineering graduate student Patrick Bouffard. Working out of Professor Claire Tomlin's lab, Bouffard built a Kinect-enhanced robotic helicopter that perceives objects in its path. A video of the device has been a viral hit on YouTube.

Berkeley Engineering grad student uses Kinect to create flying AI robot

12/07/10 Eng Tips — EECS grad student Patrick Bouffard, working with Professor Claire Tomlin from the Hybrid Systems Lab, has used Microsoft's Kinect controller to create a quadcopter which can maneuver around obstacles autonomously. The developers attached the Kinect hardware to the device which delivers a point cloud to the on-board computer and allows the vehicle to map its surroundings and move about intelligently. A video documenting the project and posted on YouTube is on track for going viral.

Bionic legs allow paraplegics to get up and walk

10/11/10 TIME Magazine — A robotic exoskeleton called eLEGS enables people who have been paralyzed below the waist to walk again. The technology, the latest in a line of "human augmentation robotics systems" that Berkeley Bionics has created with the Robotics and Human Engineering Laboratory at the University of California, Berkeley, is geared toward consumers -- the 6 million or so paraplegics in the U.S. who are bound to wheelchairs.

Q&A: Ken Goldberg discusses telerobots, androids, and Heidegger

10/01/10 IEEE Spectrum — An interview with Ken Goldberg, a robotics professor at UC Berkeley, exploring the historical, philosophical and technical aspects of telepresence robots.

Artificial ‘e-skin’ may soon help robots ‘feel’

09/12/10 PCWorld — Engineers at UC Berkeley have developed a new technology that may help robots feel, give the sense of touch back to those with prosthetic limbs, and ultimately help robots do the dishes without breaking them. The material is built using semiconductor nanowires that can operate using low voltages, is more flexible than previous inorganic synthetic skins, and is also stronger than its competing organic materials.

Laundry robot achieves another landmark, this time pairing your socks

08/24/10 Popular Science — A team of UC Berkeley researchers interested in domestic applications for robotics has shown that Willow Garage's PR2 robot can be a handy household companion, namely laundry-folding. Now, they've shown that if you give PR2 a sock it can employ its keen ability for repetitive hand motions to that other regularly recurring chore: pairing socks.

Researchers empower robot to fold towels

06/03/10 — Who wouldn't want a robot that could make your bed or do the laundry? A team of Berkeley researchers has brought us one important step closer by, for the first time, enabling an autonomous robot to reliably fold piles of previously unseen towels. Robots that can do things like assembling cars have been around for decades. The towel-folding robot, however, is doing something very new, according to the researchers, doctoral student Jeremy Maitin-Shepard and assistant professor Pieter Abbeel, both of UC Berkeley's Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences.

Could robot cockroaches help Haiti earthquake victims?

01/19/10 FOXNews.com — Tech wizards at UC Berkeley's Department of Electrical Engineering are developing mini-robots to help locate earthquake survivors easily, cheaply, and quickly, without jeopardizing the lives of rescuers. They're made of cardboard, plastic, and parts of computers and bits of old toys, and operated by remote control. The goal of the project: to develop swarms of the cheap, diminutive robots that can hunt down the survivors of disasters and relay the location of survivors back to the surface.

Robots could assist in quake search and rescue

01/18/10 ABC News — Earthquake rescues could be made safer and faster with a new robot being developed at UC Berkeley by engineering grad students Paul Birkmeyer and Kevin Peterson with Professor Ron Fearing.

A search giant

04/02/08 — It's no surprise that a Google search for Peter Norvig turns up tens of thousands of hits. Norvig (Ph.D. '86 EECS) literally wrote the book on artificial intelligence, coauthoring a bestselling textbook on the subject with Professor Stuart Russell in 1995. As the senior computer scientist at NASA Ames Research Center, he led the team that developed the remote artificial intelligence software that flew aboard the Deep Space 1 spacecraft in 1999. And today, as Google's director of research, Norvig is transforming the way information is organized and accessed on the Web.