The San Francisco firm, famous for its popular car-dispatch services, is getting into the robotics business itself. They had been lured away, en masse, by a new employer: Uber. In February, a group of some 40 employees - including several longtime senior lab members - resigned. There was something missing from the lab today, though. Plaques hanging along a wall commemorate some of the hundreds of patents received over the years by the center’s 100-person staff. Today the place is crammed with projects like ‘‘Crusher,’’ an armor-plated military robot that can find its own way across craggy, wooded terrain, and a smaller wheeled robot designed to explore mines for the company Anglo American. The lab has come by its storied reputation by producing robot technology for clients like the American military and heavy-machinery manufacturers like John Deere and Caterpillar. ‘‘I aged 10 years when that robot fell down, and I gained it back when he got up again,’’ says Herman Herman, the director of the center, who has worked there since its founding 20 years ago. Other robots fell over without getting back up. Though it finished behind teams from South Korea and Florida, CHIMP made robot history by falling and then returning to its feet. Highly Intelligent Mobile Platform.’’) The robot is one the best-known creations to emerge from the center: Earlier this year it placed third in a competition sponsored by the federal government to create an automaton able to perform several humanlike tasks, like cutting a precise hole in a wall with a hand-held electric saw, climbing a small set of stairs and opening a door.
A tall, lanky man who was indeed wearing steel-toed footwear, Vande Weghe has spent the last two years as one of the engineers building CHIMP for the National Robotics Engineering Center at Carnegie Mellon University. ‘‘It’s a hazard for humans to be around - we wear steel-toed boots,’’ Michael Vande Weghe told me.
The contraption weighs 407 pounds and is powerful enough to bench-press 150 pounds. If the robot - a five-foot-tall, crimson-colored humanoid machine designed to emulate the complex movements of the human body - moved suddenly and hit one of them accidentally in the chest, it could easily break some ribs. On its head, two rapidly rotating laser scanners enabled it to monitor its surroundings, but the engineers standing nearby were wary nonetheless. In the center of the lab, CHIMP stretched out one huge arm, then gracefully unfurled its three metal fingers, as if about to beckon someone.
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