News Releases
Public Relations Office, School of Computer Science, Carnegie Mellon University
Pittsburgh PA 15213-3891
(412)268-3830 . (412)268-5016 (fax)

12 March 1998

Whittaker Receives Achievement Award, $15,000 Grant from "Design News"

Design News magazine will honor William "Red" Whittaker, the Robotics Institute's Fredkin research professor and director of the Field and Mobile Robotics Center (FRC), with its 1998 Special Achievement Award for his pioneering work developing autonomous mobile robots. The award includes a $15,000 educational grant, which Whittaker plans to donate to the Robotics Institute.

Whittaker is one of three distinguished engineers who will receive awards at a banquet and ceremony March 17 at the Ritz Carlton Hotel in Chicago. Brian Muirhead will receive the magazine's Engineer of the Year Award for his work on the planetary explorers Sojourner and Pathfinder, and Horst Maack will be presented with the magazine's Engineering Quality Award for his work at Cincinnati Milacron Corp.

Whittaker and a number of his robotic projects are featured in a seven-page color story in the magazine's March 2 issue.

"At the FRC, we are creating a whole new category of machines' machines that go places, that move, that think, that decide, that explore~all on their own," Whittaker said in the magazine article.

Last summer, Whittaker supervised a team of Carnegie Mellon researchers who were directing Nomad, a prototype planetary rover that made an unprecedented 133-mile journey through Chile's Atacama Desert while being teleoperated from the Carnegie Science Center in Pittsburgh and NASA's Ames Research Center in California.

Early this year, several of these researchers spent nearly a month in Antarctica testing component technologies that will enable Nomad to search for meteorites on the frozen continent, or perhaps serve as a prototype for rovers that will search the poles of the Moon for water.

Whittaker first caught the public's eye in the early 1980s when he developed a trio of unmanned, teleoperated robotic work systems that helped to clean up a damaged nuclear power plant at Three Mile Island, near Harrisburg, Pa. He was subsequently invited to Ukraine by the (then) Soviet government to advise on clean-up operations at the Chernobyl nuclear power station, where a reactor exploded in 1986.

Since that time he has been the principal investigator on a succession of groundbreaking projects that spawned mobile robots for work in construction, mining, agriculture, energy, subsea, space and defense.

Whittaker's experience with nuclear disasters has placed Carnegie Mellon and its spinoff RedZone Robotics in the front line of a team developing and deploying a robot that will be sent to inspect and map the interior of building 4 of the Chernobyl plant early this summer.

"Red has made extraordinary contributions in bringing robots out of the factory and making them work in natural and hazardous environments," said Robotics Institute Director Takeo Kanade. "He is a top researcher with a bold and deep vision into the future of robotics and he has the energy to make his vision happen, and very quickly."

"Red Whittaker is known around the world for his contributions to robotics," President Cohon added. "His innovative work has caught the attention of our nation and the world, and in so doing he has brought accolades to Carnegie Mellon."

Whittaker conceived and oversaw the development and deployment of Dante I and II, two unique eight-legged robots designed for NASA to explore the craters of active volcanoes in Antarctica and Alaska. Dante II completed its mission, sending back hitherto unseen pictures and scientific information from the crater floor of Mt. Spurr in Alaska.

Prior to that, Whittaker steered development of the Ambler, a six-legged autonomous robot with the perception, planning and motor skills to explore varied terrains. The Ambler set new standards for duration and difficulty of autonomous walking. The breakthroughs it made in terrain modeling, gait and footfall planning, robot configuration and autonomous walking earned it a prestigious 1992 Computerworld Smithsonian Award.

Over a decade, Whittaker developed a family of wheeled mobile robots. The first, known as the Terregator, pioneered sonar, laser and camera sensing outdoors and in underground mines. His team developed Navlab I, a streetworthy van that drives autonomously on roads and first broke the 25-miles-per-hour speed barrier.

The technology was subsequently enhanced with Global Positioning System waypoint navigation, transferred to offroad mine trucks and commercialized by Caterpillar Corp. This development led to the HMMWV, a camouflaged Army ambulance equipped to navigate off-road terrain and public highways at speeds up to 60 miles per hour.

Whittaker and his colleagues also developed the Locomotion Emulator, an omnidirectional testbed machine that can mimic the movements of a variety of vehicles through various software configurations. In 1991 the software was transferred to a mining machine operating at an underground coal mine in Kentucky. The software enables the machine to do continuous, autonomous mining.

Whittaker also led the development of a robotic machine to inspect and waterproof the heat shielding tiles on the belly of the Space Shuttle. The machine, known as the Tessellator, was shipped to NASA's Kennedy Space Center in 1994.

In addition to pursuing projects involving the robotic decommissioning of nuclear facilities, inspection of storage tanks and development of automated trucks and excavators, Whittaker has begun to make inroads in automating agricultural harvesting and commercializing robotic excursion on the Moon. With the latest news about the Lunar Prospector spacecraft finding water ice at the poles of the Moon, his vision has the potential to become a reality.

A civil engineer, Whittaker came to Carnegie Mellon after receiving a bachelor's degree in civil engineering from Princeton University in 1973. He earned his master's and doctor's degrees in civil engineering at Carnegie Mellon in 1975 and 1979, respectively. He has directed the FRC since 1986 and became chief scientist at Carnegie Mellon's National Robotics Engineering Consortium when it was established in 1994.

The "Design News" award for special achievement is not his first. "Science Digest" magazine named him one of the top 100 U.S. innovators for his work in robotics. He received the Vectors Pittsburgh Man of the Year in Technology award in 1994, and a 1994 Aviation Week & Space Technology Laurels Award for outstanding achievement. He is also a recipient of Carnegie Mellon~s Teare Award for Teaching Excellence and the university~s Alumni Merit Award for outstanding achievement.


Return to: SCS News Releases
SCS-Today
School of Computer Science homepage

This page maintained by copetas@cs.cmu.edu.