Inside CMU's Robotics Innovation Center

Situated on the banks of the Monongahela River in Pittsburgh’s Hazelwood neighborhood, CMU’s new Robotics Innovation Center rises as a 150,000-square-foot testament to the university’s robotics legacy and its commitment to innovation. When Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro helped cut the ribbon on the facility in February, he wasn’t just opening another building — he was launching what may be the most consequential robotics proving grounds in the world. Inside, more than 50 labs and working groups will chase breakthroughs that will reshape how robots operate on land, underground, in the air and deep beneath the water’s surface. The Robotics Innovation Center — or the RIC, as researchers have taken to calling it — was designed to connect research with commercial ventures by housing university teams next to industry partners. The facility complements the work of CMU’s National Robotics Engineering Center, the world’s largest robotics research and development organization. And it’s situated next to Mill 19, the 265,000-square-foot manufacturing research hub that is home to CMU’s Manufacturing Futures Institute and the Catalyst Connection workforce training center. Next door, the University of Pittsburgh is building BioForge, a $250 million facility focused on breakthroughs in biomanufacturing. Taken together, Hazelwood Green is a haven for groundbreaking, multidisciplinary research. With its unique location and high-tech infrastructure, the RIC has been engineered to showcase innovation, inspire future generations and highlight how CMU contributes to the greater Pittsburgh community and the ever-evolving innovation economy. “The Robotics Innovation Center offers Carnegie Mellon researchers new opportunities to develop and test robotics, automation and physical AI in the real world,” said Martial Hebert, dean and University Professor of Robotics in the School of Computer Science. “Scientists from across the university will tackle challenges ranging from agriculture and manufacturing to search and rescue and exploration. A new generation of world-changing research will happen inside the RIC.” An artist’s rendering of the interior of the Robotics Innovation Center. Two students fly a drone in the RIC’s exterior drone cage. To date, several research companies and projects have already moved in. The largest is FieldAI, an industry leader known for developing autonomous robots that work in unstructured environments. Professor in the Robotics InstituteMichael Kaessworks at the RIC and has launched Aquatonomy, a startup developing robots for underwater inspection. SteelEagle — a research project run byMahadev Satyanarayanan, the Jaime Carbonell University Professor of Computer Science — uses the RIC as its testing ground. The project is developing software that can transform commercial drones into fully autonomous flying vehicles. Most recently, Fujitsu Limited, a Japanese technology company, announced a partnership with CMU to create a new Physical AI Research Center at the RIC. CMU researchers will work alongside Fujitsu scientists, engineers and technicians to develop physical AI systems designed to tackle real-world challenges. David Lindlbauer, Assistant Professor in CMU’s Human-Computer Interaction Institute “The RIC and its resources serve as a hotbed for innovation,” saidDavid Lindlbauer, an assistant professor in CMU’s Human-Computer Interaction Institute, who has a joint research project with Fujitsu on human behavior simulation for robotics. “Researchers from CMU and from industry will work side by side to tackle hard and impactful problems, from understanding human behavior to developing novel interactive systems and advanced spatial robotics. Fujitsu’s expanded presence and research will undoubtedly lead to interesting new synergies and expand the collaboration portfolio into new and exciting areas.” The vision of co-locating researchers and industry professionals became a reality in February when FieldAI became the RIC’s inaugural corporate tenant. The company is valued at$2 billion and includes more than 200 employees in the U.S. Its robots are deployed in eight different industries, including construction, energy, manufacturing, logistics and security. Sebastian Scherer, Associate Research Professor in the RI Based in California, FieldAI was founded by a team from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. Globally renowned robotics expertSebastian Scherer, research professor in the Robotics Institute, is a director at FieldAI and manager of the Pittsburgh offices, which will house 10 employees. Locating a thriving company next to university researchers will help students understand what it takes to bring discoveries to market, Scherer said. “Bringing FieldAI to the RIC creates a unique cooperation between academic discovery and real-world deployment,” he said. A FieldAI self driving vehicle traverses a dirt road in California. “CMU researchers and students will have a front-row seat to the engineering challenges of scaling AI for the field and will see what it takes to make the technology work in demanding scenarios. With FieldAI in the building, we can see exactly how our foundational research translates into commercial applications and uncover new directions for our work in the lab.” The RIC also offers significant advantages to FieldAI. Because the company is putting robots into unstructured work environments, they need to test the robots in a wide variety of interactions. The RIC provides those opportunities. The facility boasts of a 50,000-square-foot indoor robot testing floor and a 1.5-acre outdoor testing area. Additionally, earlier this year, CMU partnered with OptiTrack, the world’s largest motion capture provider and a pioneer in precision 3D tracking technology. OptiTrack equips the RIC with advanced motion capture systems in an indoor studio and the outdoor drone cage. The motion system can track motion up to a sub-millimeter precision with infrared dots, which allows FieldAI to map and recreate human motion, said Scherer. “FieldAI uses a mix of traditional methods and the latest learning-based methods that leverage our own data to model different scenarios,” Scherer said. “We have to push the envelope to improve the system.” In addition to indoor and outdoor simulation spaces, the RIC offers a quieter but equally profound aquatic testing ground. A specially designed 75,000-gallon water tank allows researchers, including Kaess, to test autonomous underwater vehicles, or AUVs. The tank is 10 feet deep and painted black to simulate the darkness found deep under water. Its concrete walls are engineered to absorb sonar acoustics rather than reflect them. “The water tank enables us to pursue new projects that will put us on the map for underwater research,” Kaess explained. “It’s much more difficult to do experiments with underwater robots rather than flying or driving because it’s difficult to get a chunk of ocean into the lab.” A team of undergraduate robotics and engineering students — the TartanAUV group — also uses the RIC’s water tank for development. The team takes part in the annual RoboSub competition sponsored by the U.S. Office of Naval Research. Six students stand at the edge of the RIC’s water tank operating an underwater robot. Kaess’ lab is working to build AUVs that can create 3D maps of underwater surfaces and inspect underwater infrastructure such as dams, bridge pilings and locks, and commercializing that work in a startup called Aquatonomy. His research is funded by the U.S. Navy and Army, the National Science Foundation, and the Department of Energy, among others. Working underwater presents unique challenges. GPS doesn’t work because radio waves don’t propagate underwater. It can be difficult to keep a vehicle steady in moving currents, and it’s hard to create maps and assess structures in low-to-zero visibility. To overcome these challenges, Kaess’ AUVs use acoustic sensors, odometry, inertial sensors and Doppler veloc