Roboclub News Archive

Open House and Other Happenings

Spring Carnival was a blast. Roboclub participated in Mobot and held our annual Open House read more » by spencer barton on APRIL 26, 2013

Spring Shop Training

If you have any interest in using the Machine Shop this semester and the first few weeks of Fall 2013, attending a training session either Saturday or Sunday this weekend (02/02/13 - 02/02/13) is required. read more » by pace nalbone on JANUARY 31, 2013

ToolTron

The ToolTron team has been making great strides in an effort to ensure that our machine shop stays safe for everyone trained to work in there. read more » by pace nalbone on JANUARY 13, 2013

RobOrchestra Project Update

The RobOrchestra team has been working on a new robot; this time to play a trumpet using compressed air. read more » by pace nalbone on JANUARY 13, 2013

Quadrotor Project Update

The team responsible for the Quadrotor project has divided into subteams, each with a different purpose to have the main quadrotor flying by the end of the semester. read more » by pace nalbone on JANUARY 13, 2013

WCTU Project Update

The group working towards a wirelessly controlled testing unit has made considerable progress since the start of last semester. read more » by pace nalbone on JANUARY 13, 2013

RoboChef Project Update

The team working on automating cooking has decided to start with preparing eggs, read more info inside. read more » by pace nalbone on JANUARY 13, 2013

Tank Chair Update

Last semester the Tank Chair group made great progress towards a mobile platform which can drive users around. read more » by pace nalbone on JANUARY 13, 2013

SHRG Deadline October 7th

Each year Roboclub offers grants to help fund projects for members. These can be used for individual use, or for projects, even though with SURG funding as well. read more » by pace nalbone on SEPTEMBER 20, 2012

Friends Letter: Spring 2012

Hello, friends of the Robotics Club! We have a lot to share with you. In the past year we've seen four new projects get off the ground, and we've seen our existing projects come up with amazing new ideas. See the full story for a summary of the last year with Roboclub! read more » by alex zirbel on APRIL 03, 2012

Annual Rube Goldberg Ice Cream Competition

Stop by Friday April 6th at 9pm in the UC for Roboclub's Late Night and free icecream! read more » by priyanka deo on MARCH 25, 2012

Robotics Club E-Week Involvement

The Society of Women Engineers (SWE) hosted an event on the Sunday during E-Week to showcase engineering to youngsters from around the area. Once again, Roboclub represented the robotics side of engineering with a few of the club projects doing their demos for the kids! read more » by alex zirbel on MARCH 06, 2012

New Partnership with Trinity Robotics!

The Carnegie Mellon Robotics Club is excited to announce a new partnership with a budding collegiate Robotics Organization! We have have been working with the Trinity Robotics Club, at Trinity College in Dublin, Ireland as they establish themselves and begin to do exciting work. read more » by alex zirbel on FEBRUARY 15, 2012

Colony Prepares Way For New Platform

The Colony Team is pushing towards having a fully functional Scout platform by the end of the semester. The Scout is designed as an evolution of the current platform employed by Colony, building on the technology of the older Colony III robots and offering new functionality to each individual robot. In this way each robot can offer more intelligence to the swarm, operate over more extreme terrain, and cover larger distances more quickly.

Check out the full article for more Colony updates! read more » by alex zirbel on DECEMBER 08, 2011

Underwater Swarm Takes Cooperative Robots Undersea

Underwater Swarm's goal is to create a group of low-cost robots which are capable of cooperating to solve problems in a challenging undersea environment. Applications include mapping, imaging, environmental monitoring, surveillance, and exploration. read more » by alex zirbel on NOVEMBER 08, 2011

Pittsburgh Maker Faire Photos

The Robotics Club had the chance to showcase our work and meet the makers of other cool creations at the first Pittsburgh Mini Maker Faire, October 23! We brought robots from a number of projects, and they were a big hit! Check out the photos! read more » by alex zirbel on NOVEMBER 08, 2011

Colony Presents: Traffic Navigation (Video)

The Colony Project uses a team of low-cost swarm robots to perform various team-related tasks. This video demonstrates last year's project of getting colony robots to avoid collisions at intersections. It's an awesome video which never got published to the homepage - so here it is! read more » by alex zirbel on OCTOBER 23, 2011

Welcome Back 2011!

Welcome back to old members, and a big welcome to new Carnegie Mellon students! We're excited to start a new year, so here's where you can find information about upcoming events and projects. read more » by alex zirbel on SEPTEMBER 07, 2011

Friends Letter: Spring 2011

Spring Carnival is next week, which means the Open House is just around the corner! We'll be having the open house at 1:00 on Friday, April 15- right after the Mobot Slalom Race and RobOrchestra performance. Follow down some Roboclub members after either event and see all the other cool projects in the works. read more » by mike ornstein on APRIL 06, 2011

Colony Scout Offers Cute And Useful Swarm Robots

Colony Scout is a modular robot platform designed to provide adaptable and affordable swarm robotics to anyone who wants it. Modular and adaptable means that each individual robot comes with an accessory plate to which you can bolt pretty much anything you want, including a little forklift that extends up to 6 inches, or a digger arm and bucket with a 2 pound capacity.

Besides the accessories, Colony Scout is designed to be cheap and simple. The batteries and processor are easy to access, and the basic robot includes long range sonar and short range IR sensors to allow for obstacle avoidance. Also, the two halves of the chassis are coupled with a rotating joint, allowing the robot to navigate some pretty serious bumps, even at its 2 mph top speed: read more » by evan ackerman on DECEMBER 02, 2010

First Annual LAN Party

RoboClub will be hosting our first annual LAN party! Halo: Combat Evolved, StarCraft I & II, and WarCraft III will be the games of the night. The onslaught begins at 8:00 on Friday night so come down to the club with your computer, or use one of the club's- 'first come first serve. We'll have the games ready to install and plenty of power, network, pizza, soda, snacks and ammo until at least 2:00 AM read more » by mike ornstein on NOVEMBER 29, 2010

New Website 2010

It's here! Welcome to launch day. While not quite as epic as what the folks down at NASA are doing, we hope you enjoy the presentation. Our old website got high marks for functionality and reliability, but was lacking in the style department. Rather than put lipstick on a pig, we started with a brand new codebase that serves up the pages quickly in a prettier package. read more » by daniel shope on NOVEMBER 23, 2010

CMUQuadrotor: Autonomous Exploration From Above

Mapping and exploring unknown and potentially hazardous areas is a task often delegated to robots. From bomb-sniffers to undersea explorers, robotics is often the only way to keep humans out of harm's way. Exploring these environments is typically done via remote control, creating what are essentially robotic tools ultimately controlled by human brains. What happens when an environment is not only too hazardous for humans, but prevents remote control from being a practical solution?

Underground mines with no signal reception, disaster areas with too much interference, and even foreign planets all match this description, yet they must be explored. CMUQuadrotor aims to solve this problem. read more » by mike ornstein on NOVEMBER 21, 2010

Robotics Club Friends

This past year has been a busy one for the Robotics Club. We have seen the introduction of a new project, stalwart projects awarded, and improvements made around the club. The URO has continued its support of the club's projects, awarding small grants to every Roboclub project that applied for one. Also, the club has been giving new projects access to some funding in order to get them rolling. One such new project is Stairbot, which provides the club a new interesting mobile platform to develop. At Meeting of the Minds, both the RobOchestra and Colony projects were graced with lifetime achievement awards for their continued hard work in expanding upon their projects. The ASME team also won first place at their regional competition.

A major change to the shop has taken place with the completion of Tooltron. Tooltron has given the club another way to keep everyone who uses the shop safer. Trained members simply swipe their CMU IDs and select which machine tool to use and begin their work. Hot air rework and desoldering stations are keeping the electronics bench up to date. We are also now the proud owners of a Makerbot Cupcake 3D Printer and are learning how to use that in our prototyping process. Making one off parts with our Cupcake in little time is a huge asset to the club. read more » by mike ornstein on AUGUST 12, 2010

Summer Happenings

So it's summer in the 'burgh, and that means two things: Heat and Rain. Well, come shelter yourself from the adversity outdoors and hang out with us in the club. If you're around this summer make yourself a part of the summer D-List: RC-summer at andrew. read more » by mike ornstein on JUNE 08, 2010

Carnival Open House

Last weekend was the Robotics Club Open House. The event coincided with the CMU Spring Carnival as well as the National Robotics Week.

Each project put on a demonstration for those in attendance:

Air hockey demonstrated the capabilities of their air hockey robot through a few games against guests of the event. Colony had their robots playing a game of robot tag. Stairbot publicized their progress through a function test. Roborchestra put on a demo performance of its newest instruments integrated with the rest of the orchestra. Red Robot made an appearance at the Mobot Races and led those in attendance to the open house event.

iHeartRobotics published on their site. You can find the article here: http://www.iheartrobotics.com/2010/04/national-robotics-week-pittsburgh.html read more » by mike ornstein on APRIL 25, 2010

Rube Goldberg Competition Results

Thanks to everyone who came to our Rube Goldberg Ice Cream Competition last Friday night! It was a great event, and we hope everyone had a good time.

Congratulations to the winning teams:

1st Place: Lactation Station (Doug, Scratch, Alex, Julia)
2nd Place: Banana Splitters (Abe, Leto, Faiz) read more » by chris mar on APRIL 12, 2010

RobOrchestra Show - Friday 11/20

RobOrchestra will be playing in Skibo Cafe this Friday (11/20) from 6pm to 8pm. The show will include their instrument-playing robots, featuring: - old favorites: BassBot, XyloBot, and SnareBot - veteran back from retirement: Flutophone - new faces: Whamola and High Hat

Come to the show to hear a great selection of songs, including Flight of the Bumblebee and Mr. Roboto. We hope to see you there!

Stay tuned for an update after the show (with video for those who couldn't be there). read more » by chris mar on NOVEMBER 19, 2009

VideoTron - The Roboclub YouTube Channel

We have created a channel on YouTube where we will post videos from the Robotics Club. You can find our page here:

YouTube - CMURoboclub's Channel The first two videos have been posted, so take a look:

• The Office theme - RobOrchestra
• Hunter Prey - Colony

We will post more videos soon, so subscribe to our channel and stay tuned! read more » by mike ornstein on AUGUST 12, 2010

Project Sponsorship Results

Thanks to all the projects that participated in this year's sponsorship competition. We saw some great presentations, and have decided to award prize money to the following projects: read more » by chris mar on NOVEMBER 12, 2009

Robotics Club Sponsorship Presentation Session

The club is offering two $500 project sponsorship awards for current club members. If you are interested in funding to start a new project or continue a current one, there will be a presentation session this Sunday (October 11th) at 3pm (location TBA) where you can present your project ideas to us. To apply, please send a short abstract (a few sentences) about your project proposal to us at officers AT roboticsclub DOT org by Wednesday October 7th. This abstract should just be a brief overview of your project. read more » by chris mar on OCTOBER 07, 2009

Upcoming Training Sessions & Introductory Seminar

If you need shop training, basic electronics, or just want to know more about robots, check out the training and seminar schedule for this weekend. All of these sessions take place in the Robotics Club room in the UC. read more » by james kong on SEPTEMBER 08, 2009

General Body Meeting and Activities Fair

Roboclub will be at the Activities Fair on Wednesday (9/2) from 4-6pm. See here for location info. Rumors going around are saying that Red Robot will be making an appearance. We do not confirm nor deny these rumors. read more » by james kong on AUGUST 29, 2009

Meeting of the Minds Results

Last week, the Robotics Club had yet another successful showing at CMU's Undergraduate Research Symposium, Meeting of the Minds. Two of the club's projects, as well as a couple of individual members took home some great awards this year. read more » by chris mar on MAY 16, 2009

T-Shirt Design Contest Results

Congratulations to Brad Hall for winning this year's Roboclub T-Shirt Design Contest! The winning design is attached. read more » by chris mar on MAY 05, 2009

Robotics Club Presented to Penn State DuBois

On Monday Brad and I presented the robotics club and current projects to a Penn State campus in DuBois, PA (power point attached). We got nothing but positive comments and enthusiastic questions afterward, as well as a grant to continue doing what we do best. read more » by austin buchan on APRIL 22, 2009

Roboclub T-Shirt Design Contest

Please submit your design for next year's Roboclub T-Shirt to officers (at) roboticsclub (dot) org by Wenesday, April 22. Your design proposal can be hand-drawn (and scanned) or drawn on a computer. Try to submit it in a reasonable, easily-viewed format. read more » by chris mar on APRIL 02, 2009

A Night At NREC

On Tuesday April 7th NREC will be hosting an open house from 5:00 to 7:30ish PM and there will be free food.

At this event there will be tours of the facility, talks by Senior Engineers about NREC robots and free dinner. read more » by rich hong on MARCH 18, 2009