40 What other Organizations are working with robotics? NationalLaboratories
Description
This article is from the Robotics FAQ, by Kevin Dowling nivek@cs.cmu.edu with numerous contributions by others.
40 What other Organizations are working with robotics? NationalLaboratories
The US National Laboratories are large complexes with a number of
robotics efforts. One current focus is the enormous and costly
cleanup of the weapons complexes throughout the country.
Remediation, removal and cleanup of hazardous materials will require
hundreds of billions of $$$ and many years. Robotics will be a key
in much of this.
"Sandia National Laboratories"
Albuquerque, NM Sandia is a DOE National Laboratory with a
substantial program in robotics at its Intelligent Systems and
Robotics Center. The Center has interests in manufacturing,
hazardous material handling, site remediation, and research to
support these applications. Consequently areas of focus include
assembly planning, robotic interfaces, control theory, motion
planning, sensor fusion, sensor development, mobile vehicles,
telemanagement, mobile vehicles, and so on.
At the time of writing (2/15/93) the center has nearly 100 full-time
staff with degrees in computer science, mechanical engineering,
mathematics, electrical engineering, as well as a few in other
fields. The mix is about 30% PhD, 40%MS, and 30% BS. Recent hires
have come from Cornell, Stanford, Berkeley, CMU, Illinois, Penn, ...
The center operates over 20 fully equipted labs including robots
from Puma, Adept, GCA, Cincinnati Millacron, and Schilling. The
virtual reality lab includes stereoscopic viewers from Fake Space,
audio, speech recognition and synthesis, and big boxes from SGI to
drive the graphics. In addition to the normal complement of
departmental computing we have use of other compute resources at
Sandia including a 1000 node N-cube, a 1000+node Intel Paragon,
several crays, a CM-200 (16K procs).
Contacts: Randy Brost, Pat Xavier, Sharon Stansfield, Pang Chen,
David Strip, Jim Novak, Ray Harrigan, Pat Eicker, Bob Anderson.
"Oak Ridge National Laboratory"
Center for Engineering Systems Advanced Research
P. O Box 2008, MS-6364
Oak Ridge, TN 37831-6364
tel: 615.241.4959
fax: 615.574.7860 Contact: Dr. Lynne E. Parker, email:
ParkerLE@ornl.gov
Research in mobile and manipulator robotics, including redundant and
multiple manipulators, cooperating mobile robots, parallel vision
systems, sensor fusion, laser range finder research, real-time
quantitative reasoning and behavior based control, and machine
learning. Current applications include robots for nuclear power
stations, environmental restoration and waste management, material
handling, and automated manufacturing.
Researchers: James Baker, Marty Beckerman, Chuck Glover, William
Grimmell, Judd Jones, Reinhold Mann, Ed Oblow, Lynne Parker,
Nageswara Rao, David Reister, Phil Spelt, Michael Unseren.
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