Bill Ross
Principal Commercialization Specialist
National Robotics Engineering Center
br@cmu.edu -- (412) 848-1148

Sensabot IECEx compliant sensing robot for semi-autonomous and teleoperated inspection tasks in oil and gas plants and other hazardous industrial environments. Designed for long-term operation in unmanned facilities, hazardous environments, offshore plaforms and other high-risk environments.

Sensabot web site with latest pictures and videos.

2-D Simultaneous Localization And Mapping (SLAM) software system for control of industrial robots in indoor settings.  Optimized and enhanced algorithm based on DpSlam running with a single planar laser scanner in real-time on a standard workstation.

Six camera, 360 degree teleoperation camera system with integral video encoding.  Provides capability to tune image parameters to suit a wide variety of communication link capabilities from 1 to 25 Mbit/sec.  Deployed on operational robot systems.

Agile robotic platform for software development.  High performance, battery powered system for use indoors or in the field.  Ample power and payload supports a wide variety of sensors and computing platforms while high torque motors allow robot to be driven in either articulated or skid-steer modes.

Teleoperation testbed for NREC Crusher robot.  Five high resolution cameras tethered with fiber-optic spooler to operator's station mounted in motion-simulator pod.  Full control of video quality, bandwidth and latency allowed characterization of operator performance for a variety of simulated communications systems. 

System for classification of mouse behaviors for an ongoing research and development effort in cooperation with a private drug discovery company. This hardware and software system automates pharmaceutical research by using computer vision to automatically classify behaviors of mice. Scored behaviors for thousands of mice are automatically analyzed using machine learning techniques to determine the behavioral effects of potential drug compounds.  Multiple systems in commercial use.

Robotic coatings removal system for ships, storage tanks and other steel structures.  Highly agile electric drive with patented magnetic attach.  Blasts paint and rust from the surface using very high pressure water.  Debris are vacuumed away for enviromentally safe capture and treatment.  In commercial use by shipyard service company.

Reconfigurable Vision Machine project which developed a very high performance, DSP-based, custom 120-CPU reconfigurable image processor now in production.  Machine can be configured using a variety of processing, control and I/O modules.  Six high-speed communications ports per module enable use of a variety of multiprocessing approaches and topologies.  In use for commercial product inspection.