NREC advances the commercialization of robotics via technology licensing through Carnegie Mellon’s Center for Technology Transfer (CTT). Each year CTT licenses technologies to companies ranging in size from local startups to multinational corporations from all over the world. Companies use these technologies to create products and services that give them a sustaining competitive advantage. A typical license gives a company the right to use, make, have made and sell or lease products or services that incorporate the Carnegie Mellon technology. The company can also create derivatives and protect these with their own patents, copyrights and trademarks. Exclusive and non-exclusive licenses can be tailored to countries and fields of use as desired.

In many research projects, the company sponsor negotiates an exclusive license for NREC developed technology in a specified field of use. This is an effective way to transition NREC project deliverables to products that provide a competitive edge to our sponsors

There are other cases where NREC technology can be licensed to any third party because the technology was developed with internal or government funds, was licensed non-exclusively, or has utility in a different field of use than that negotiated with an exclusive licensee.

For information on how you can license NREC's technologies for use in your products and services, please contact Rob Conway at 412.268.6439 or rconway@andrew.cmu.edu or visit CTT's website at www.carnegiemellonctt.com.

Available NREC Licenses

Stability Prediction System (SPS)


During vehicular operation, the system continuously and actively calculates stability margin measurements to trigger an alarm, drive a "governor” device or alter the suspension. It calculates lateral acceleration as either curvature or speed increase. When state-of-motion activity risks rollover, the system recognizes the situation and triggers the desired action.

NREC’s Stability Prediction System (SPS) can be used in a wide variety of indoor and outdoor material handling and excavation vehicles, whether they are man-driven or robotic. The system also could be used as the basis for a stability governor that discourages maneuver-induced rollover of automobiles and other man-driven vehicles.

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High Precision Object Localization System for AGVs


US Patent 6,952,488
NREC developed a camera-based vision system for autonomous fork trucks that locates pallet holes for pallet pick-up. A visual servoing system uses this information to autonomously drive the fork truck to pick up the pallet.

The same system can measure the relative position of a rack on the forks compared to one on the shop floor. In this case, the visual servoing system drives the fork truck to stack the new rack on top of the old. The above fork hole localizer can then reverse the process.

The approach easily generalizes to objects other than pallets and racks. Versions based on imaging laser rangefinders can also be adapted from the camera-based solution.

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Position Measurement for Automated Mining Machinery

US Patents 6,203,111 and 6,296,317
Automated machines operating in underground mines require accurate position estimation to operate safely and productively. GPS unavailability and the high cost of installing and maintaining infrastructure-based positioning systems prevent a practical solution. NREC developed two positioning technologies that capitalize on the mine’s natural structure coupled with equipment widely used in mines:

•	A heading control system to measure heading and lateral offset of a mining machine. It uses a mining surveyor laser and on board camera, gyro and algorithms to calculate machine heading.

•	A sump depth control system to measure or control the forward motion of the mining machine over short distances. Several stereo camera pairs aimed at the roof and ribs of the mine sense surface texture. The system processes this information to report vehicle motion.

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Automated Container Handling


US Patent Pending 10/120,333
NREC’s robotic field-container handling systems improve efficiency in the traditionally labor-intensive process of moving containerized plants. NREC developed a self-mobile system that has a grabber subsystem for grasping objects, including assemblies for movement along X, Y and Z axes and for rotation. An imaging system determines the geometric position of the objects and moves the grabber subsystem accordingly.

Another embodiment of the system is provided as an accessory to a prime mover. It includes an alignment articulation system, a gross advance system, a tine storage system, a loading head system, and pot grabbers. This automated handling system can be used to move plant containers in nurseries from the ground to a trailer bed and/or from a trailer bed to the ground in a variety of container configurations.

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Medical Image Registration


NREC designed and implemented a medical image registration system to recover the 6D pose of patient anatomy based on 2D radiographs acquired at the time of treatment and 3D CT data used during treatment planning. The system utilizes an image-comparison algorithm, Variance-Weighted Sum of Local Normalized Correlation, which greatly decreases the impact of clutter and unrelated objects in the input radiographs. This image comparison approach is combined with hardware-accelerated rendering of simulated X-ray images to permit registration of noisy, cluttered images with sub-millimeter accuracy.

The algorithm is applicable to both radiotherapeutic and orthopedic procedures.

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Autonomous Robot

The robot includes all the necessary hardware, sensing and software for autonomous operation indoors or outdoors. Its well documented application program interface (API) and modular design allows for partial or total swap of the autonomy software modules with the owner’s software. A developer-friendly design features long battery life, standard development environment, extensive data logging capabilities, and system simulator.

The robot includes three 2.0 GHz Pentium-M computers, stereo cameras, IR rangefinders, GPS, IMU, encoders, wireless communications link, and operator control unit. NREC ported its PerceptOR software to the platform to provide baseline autonomous capability.

The robot includes a comprehensive user manual that documents robot capability, baseline autonomy software, and APIs (with examples).

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