20 Colleges with Really Cool Robots on Campus

By Staff Writers
It’s not looking like we will have humanoid replicants running around by the year 2019. Heck, we won’t even have Back to the Future hoverboards by then. But progress is being made slowly and surely at colleges around the country to edge us closer to our next technology leap. These 20 campuses house some of the coolest droids and C-3POs in the country.

1. Worcester Polytechnic Institute: WPI was the first school in the country to offer an undergraduate major in robotics, and there’s always cool stuff to be found on its campus. Case in point: the Moonraker, an excavation tool for the moon that won a $500,000 prize from NASA in 2009.
2. MIT: The humanoid robotics group at MIT is home to cool iron men like Coco, a boxy little guy who looks like a smaller version of Johnny Five, and Cog, a tall robot that can move his head and arms and will soon be able to hear and touch.
3. Carnegie Mellon University: The Robotics Institute at CMU crafted Finch, a wheeled robot shaped like a little white bird, to make computer science class a bit more entertaining. Finch can say "hello, world," dance, glow, draw pictures, and more. The bot’s developers hope to make it affordable enough for every CMU student to have one, meaning this campus that is already brimming with robots will be overrun by them.
4. Stanford: If you see a VW Passat cruising the streets of Stanford, Calif., with no one behind the wheel, you should call the school and tell them Junior has gotten out. The robot car uses rotating laser scanners to survey its environment 10 times each second and decides for itself how to proceed along a preprogrammed route.
5. Lake Superior State University: The Robotics and Automation Laboratory at LSSU’s School of Engineering and Technology boasts 15 industrial robots. One of the coolest is newcomer Motoman, which can solve Rubik’s cubes after taking two photos of them. There is also a robot called Adept, which is an arm that can pick up a flashlight, install batteries in it, test it for functionality, then sort it by working and not working.
6. California Institute of Technology: In late 2009, scientists at Caltech came up with CYCLOPS, a mobile robotic platform designed to simulate what a blind person with an implant like a retinal prosthesis would experience. The wheeled robot is equipped with a camera (just like an implant) the scientists want to test as a way to objectively study the prosthesis without requiring a human test subject.
7. Olin College: The Senior Capstone Program in Engineering (SCOPE) at Olin College has been responsible for a number of cool inventions over the years. In 2005, students built a robotic tractor as a low-cost, efficient agricultural tool. Currently SCOPE members are working on projects like an autonomous crop sprayer and unmanned ground vehicles for the U.S. Army.
8. Cornell University: Researchers are making advances in machine learning at Cornell’s Personal Robotics Lab. Specifically, robots in Cornell’s lab learn to load dishwashers, a task many human males struggle with. It’s complicated for a robot because it must gauge the size and shape of an object it has picked up and find a suitably-sized empty spot to set the object in.
9. Georgia Institute of Technology: We may one day look back on Georgia Tech as the place our war with robots started. In 2010, engineers at the school programmed robots with the ability to deceive humans or other robots. More recently, researchers have designed tiny rovers that can map out an area by wheeling around autonomously and communicating with each other.
10. Northeastern University: Robotic hand rehabilitation system with interactive gaming. Low-cost smart glove for virtual reality based rehabilitation. Bio-nano-robotic systems. These are the kinds of awesome titles of projects tossed around at Northeastern. NU researchers are also teaming up with folks at MIT to bring language learning education to preschoolers by means of talking robotic plush dragons. Now there’s a phrase you don’t see every day.

Read More...