Summer 2012 - Robert Morris University

EY
They can perform surgery at a hospital,
conduct enemy surveillance on a
battlefield, or beat the smartest of
competitors on a TV game show. No,
we're not talking about Rhodes Scholars
– this is a story about robots, and how
one RMU alumna is part of a
pioneering enterprise employing
robots to perform manual labor in a
futuristic way.
Sana Ali M'10 is an applications engineer at
Pittsburgh-based Seegrid, a nine-year-old spinoff
of Carnegie Mellon University's mobile robot lab.
The company's robotic industrial trucks are
revolutionizing how inventory moves across floors
at manufacturing and distribution sites.
The typical unmanned industrial vehicle requires floor
magnets, buried wires, or costly lasers to pick up and
move materials in a warehouse. But Seegrid's two robotic
stars – a pallet truck that lifts 8,000 pounds and a tow
tractor that hauls 10,000 pounds – incorporate state-of-the
art vision technology that saves businesses time and money.
Here's how it works: Cameras mounted on a robot take
pictures of the environment. The images are recorded in the
robot's memory, and converted into maps made up of 3-D
grids. The robot is able to see the grid – hence the company's
name – and understand where it is at all times as it lugs heavy
loads from one place to another autonomously. If someone or
something gets in its way, the robot stops or slows down
until the obstacle moves away.
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