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AI & robotics

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."

Hybrid Wisdom Labs launches a speedy, scalable engine for visualizing customer insight

10/19/11 TechCrunch — Ken Goldberg, a professor of New Media, Robotics, and Industrial Engineering at UC Berkeley, launched an interesting new startup from the stage of The Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco today, called Hybrid Wisdom Labs. The startup, according to its founder, has emerged from "more than a decade of robotics and social media research at UC Berkeley."

In search of a robot more like us

07/11/11 The New York Times — Designing a robot to mimic the basic capabilities of motion and perception would be revolutionary, researchers say. Yet the challenges remain immense, far higher than artificial intelligence hurdles like speaking and hearing. The limits of today's most sophisticated robots can be seen in a robotic towel-folding demonstration pioneered by a group of students at the University of California, Berkeley, last year. "Our end goal right now is to do an entire laundry cycle," said Pieter Abbeel, a Berkeley computer scientist who leads the group.

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.

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.