The following is a guest blog by Greg Hager, Computing Community Consortium (CCC) Chair and Professor in the Department of Computer Science at Johns Hopkins University.  I recently had the opportunity to participate in a panel discussing the National Robotics Initiative (NRI). The NRI is in its 5th year, so we were asked to describe “the return on investment” of the program. Various panel members pointed out how focused and energized robotics is on high-value, relevant applications, and how it has created new startups, a new cohort of students who will power the next wave of R&D innovation, and, of course, a host of new research results. But what does this really […]

In celebration of the fifth anniversary of the National Robotics Initiative (NRI), the Congressional Robotics Caucus Advisory Committee including IEEE-USA, Computing Research Association, Carnegie Mellon University, and Georgia Tech with support from the National Science Foundation (NSF) held a Congressional Briefing with demonstrations and the Computing Community Consortium (CCC) released it’s report called Next Generation Robotics. The NRI was a direct result of a CCC roadmapping effort led by Henrik Christensen of Georgia Tech. It is based on a definitive report, A Roadmap for US Robotics — From Internet to Robotics, developed by more than 100 robotics experts from industry and academia who in 2008 attended four CCC workshops, one in each four topic areas of robotics: manufacturing and logistics, healthcare and medical robotics, service robotics, and emerging technologies. The goal of the NRI is to “accelerate […]

The National Institute of Health (NIH) has announced that it will fund the development of three co-robots, or robots that work cooperatively with people, as part of its fourth year of participation in the National Robotics Initiative (NRI). In addition to the NIH, the National Science Foundation, National Aeronautics and Space Administration, the U.S. Department of Agriculture, and the U.S. Department of Defense are supporting the development of co-robots. The three innovative co-robots being supported by NIH are: 1. A four-legged robotic smart-walker designed to help improve the mobility and quality of life of the elderly being developed by Dr. Xiangrong Shen at the University of Alabama. The robot has two […]

Robohub has recently published its list of 25 Women in Robotics You Need to Know About to highlight women who are making great contributions to modern robotics. Some highlights from the list include: Nancy Amato, a professor at Texas A&M and on the CRA’s Board of Directors. Amato is noted for her research on the algorithmic foundations of motion planning, computational biology, computational geometry and parallel computing, as well as her leadership in broadening participation in the industry. Her 1998 paper on probabilistic roadmap methods is one of the most important papers on this field. Fei-Fei Li, an associate professor at Stanford University and Director of Stanford Artificial Intelligence Lab […]

Last week we published a blog post highlighting the MIT Technology Review’s 2015 list of 35 innovators under the age of 35. This list included Travis Deyle who was a member of the Computing Community Consortium’s (CCC) CI Fellow program in 2011 and currently works at Google X Life Sciences where he has been part of a team that developed glucose-sensing and autofocusing contact lenses. Travis earned a PhD in healthcare robotics from Georgia Tech in 2011, where he built some of the first mobile robots capable operating in real homes. These robots could be used for tasks such as robot-mediated medication delivery fetching and retrieving tagged objects, and helping […]

The following is a special contribution to this blog from Computing Community Consortium (CCC) Chair Gregory Hager (Johns Hopkins University). Imagine you have to change the IV on a writhing patient while wearing two layers of protective gear, the temperature is nearly 100 degrees, the humidity is 100 percent, and you’ve been in your suit for nearly an hour. That is the daily struggle for healthcare workers across Western Africa treating Ebola patients. Can we somehow use our technologies, either those existing today or envisioned for the near future, to change the course of this daily battle and, by doing so, have an impact that could potentially save the lives of […]