The Robotics Sensor Based Planning Lab at Carnegie Mellon University conducts research into robotics motion planning, coverage, sensor-based planning, and visibility. Their site informs visitors about the research projects and researchers and provides postscript copies of related papers. Short demonstration videos, available under Projects, show sensorless and sensor-based applications. CMU's...

On September 7, doctors in the United States performed the first long distance operation, with surgeons in New York performing a laparoscopic cholecystectomy on a patient in France. The surgery was successful, and the patient was discharged from the hospital with no complications 48 hours later. Needless to say, the potential uses of such remote, robotic technology are boundless, not only in...

In a very original study on human-robot interaction, researchers at Carnegie Mellon University conducted a series of experiments to determine if people would be more willing to interact with a robot with human-like features as opposed to one without. The particular "behaviors tested were the ability to convey expression with a humanoid face and the ability to indicate attention by turning towards...

Chuck's Robotics Notebook "serves as a journal and knowledge repository for the aspiring roboticist" and includes sections on circuits, projects, and controllers. A section on Complete Robots describes some of the robots he has built and includes some photos. A "bibliography of sorts" provides his favorite books and articles "so that you can build a 'Mechatronic' library of your own." The second...

The Robotics and State Estimation Lab at the University of Washington is "interested in the development of embedded computing systems that interact autonomously with their environment in an intelligent way." The lab investigates probabilistic methods and their application to mobile robotics in order to "develop rich yet efficient methods for representing uncertainty and for reasoning under...

The Interaction Lab at the University of Southern California is part of the Center for Robotics and Embedded Systems (CRES) and the USC Robotics Labs. Its work involves "using a behavior-based approach to control, favoring solutions that are distributed, scalable, and robust" and when possible, validating algorithms in embodied domains. Areas of study include: Multi-Robot Coordination and...