The Second Annual National Robotics Week was celebrated by Carnegie Mellon University with a host of research project demonstrations at the Robotics Institute. In addition, the Teruko Yata Memorial Lecture and the yearly Mobot races were also conducted.
The memorial lecture featured William Swartout from the University of Southern California
The second week of April is observed as the National Robotics Week to honor robotics technology as one of the most important innovations of the 21st Century.
According to Rep. Mike Doyle who is the Co-Chair of the Congressional Caucus on Robotics from the 14th District of Pennsylvania, the National Robotics Week which was celebrated for the second year is still a great source of information and highlights the impact of robotics on society, both in the present and the future. Students could easily learn about engineering, science, math and technology through robotics, which would dominate the industry in fields such as manufacturing and health care and promote high-tech jobs in the U.S.
The events began with the Yata Lecture by Swartout at 3:30 pm on April 14, titled ‘What have we learned from Virtual Humans?’ in the Rashid Auditorium of the Gates and Hillman Centers. Swartout is the Director of Technology in the USC Institute for Creative Technologies. This institute has been creating and developing virtual humans for the past 10 years, and its vision is to develop computer generated characters that resemble real people in both looks and behavior. To do this, the researchers needed to combine various research disciplines such as natural language understanding, computer vision and emotion modeling.
On April 15, a series of robotics demonstrations were hosted by the Robotics Institute between noon and 4 pm on the first floor of the Gates and Hillman Centers in the Planetary Robotics Lab high bay. Very few openings were available every hour to conduct the demonstrations of balance experiments with the help of a Sarcos humanoid robot. From 4pm to 6pm, a reception was held in the high bay. The demonstrations were open for the public, while pre-registration was needed for the reception and Yata lecture. On 15 April, the 17th Annual Mobot races were conducted by the School of Computer Science, where small autonomous vehicles raced on a Slalom Course outside the Doherty and Wean halls.
Source: http://www.ri.cmu.edu