In the early 1980s, a young, newly minted Ph.D. at Carnegie Mellon University suggested freeing robots from the repetitiveness of manufacturing and the protection of university laboratories.
Robots that could work in the rugged, unpredictable world outside long were the talk of science fiction. But William "Red" Whittaker persuaded his university bosses to establish the Field Robotics Center and put the red-haired professor in charge.
"At the outset, it was fragile," Whittaker said. "Fragile, no chance, odds against it. It was like crawling out of the primeval ooze. Critics were saying: 'This isn't really science; it's not really a technology.' "
The naysayers, though, didn't get Whittaker down.
"There was too much to do," he said. "There was then, and there is now."
Today, the university celebrates the 25th anniversary of field robotics and its founder's 60th birthday. Roboticists from around the world are flying in for the occasion, and dozens more are posting congratulatory notes to an Internet guest book.
"The Field Robotics Center is the pioneer in the field and has a huge reputation," said Hugh Durrant-Whyte, research director at the Australian Centre for Field Robotics. "It is the benchmark to which we all aspire. They were the first in the field, and they're still the biggest and the best."
Field robotics means exactly that -- robots that work in the field, whether moving dirt at a construction site, collecting asteroids in Antarctica, racing across a desert or drilling for water on the moon.
They do the dull and dirty and dangerous work.
"Any time that work requires that a human would use special clothing or a suit, a protective suit, that's a pretty good indicator that there is a hazard that would motivate the use of a robot," Whittaker said.
That's what led to the center's first robot -- the Remote Reconnaissance Vehicle. In 1983, the six-wheeled buggy became the first to enter a flooded basement at Three Mile Island Nuclear Generating Station near Harrisburg. Four years earlier, the station's Unit 2 suffered a partial meltdown.
The robot returned video footage of the basement. A year later, the Remote Core Sampler brought back samples of the contaminated walls.
Nearly every year afterward produced another rugged robot or two from the Field Robotics Center -- ranging from dirt movers and diggers to rover prototypes meant to explore distant planets.
Field robots are subtly entering everyday life.
In vehicles, field robots are in electronic stability controls, which sense when a driver loses control and apply brakes to certain wheels to reduce the chance of a rollover. They work in the automatic parallel-parking features in luxury vehicles.
The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency's Urban Challenge in 2007 pitted 11 driverless vehicles against one another. Carnegie Mellon's Chevrolet Tahoe won the $2 million prize.
The contest accelerated research in autonomous driving -- vehicles that can sense where they are, analyze conditions and decide the best course of action.
"For me, this is really a straight story about augmenting the driving productivity or quality or safety on the road and off the road -- lane-keeping cruise control, crashless pullout from intersections, emergency braking that is augmented beyond what human reaction or human force would do," Whittaker said.
Caterpillar Inc., which recently opened offices on Washington's Landing to work more closely with Carnegie Mellon roboticists, is developing driverless trucks that could haul material through underground mines. It's the latest project in a partnership that started while the Field Robotics Center was in its infancy.
"Let's face it," said Sam Kherat, manager of Caterpillar's Pittsburgh Automation Center -- Carnegie Mellon is recognized worldwide "as a hub of robotic technology."
Robots are working their way into agriculture, helping the 2 percent of the U.S. population involved in food-making increase their productivity, said John Reid, John Deere's director of product technology and innovation at Moline Technology Innovation Center in Illinois.
"Where we see robotics influencing agriculture today is in GPS navigation," he said. "We still have operators on machines, but they're steered automatically across the field. ... Maybe one day the technology can be worked out where operators won't be on the machines."
In about a decade, robots could help astronauts harvest water from the moon.
"The idea is to go to the moon and participate with human astronauts in the exploration of the moon," said Brian Wilcox, a roboticist and principal investigator at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory. "The part that Red and his folks have been working on is designing and building a rover that can go down into the permanently shadowed craters of the moon and drill down for water-ice."
While the Field Robotics Center is working on a lunar rover for NASA, Whittaker has a team building one to enter the Google Lunar X Prize competition -- which offers up to $25 million to the first team that gets an autonomous rover moving on the moon and sending back video evidence -- by the end of 2010.
What comes afterward is anybody's guess, said Matt Mason, director of Carnegie Mellon's Robotics Institute.
"I don't try to speculate on what Red should or will do next," Mason said. "I simply wait and am amazed."
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