Expertise

Topics:  Human-Robot Interaction, Underwater Robotics, Space Robots and Systems, Robotics for Scientific Discovery, AI Reasoning for Robotics, Human-Centered Robotics, 3-D Vision and Recognition

Industries: Computer Software, Computer Hardware

David Wettergreen is perhaps most well known for deploying robots around the world in polar and desert environments, and into volcanoes, caves and locations that compel scientific investigation without human presence. His research focuses on robotic exploration and has included leading teams of researchers testing the wheels of the rovers that have explored Mars. For nearly 20 years, he has created robotic vehicles and technologies in navigation and autonomy and pioneered techniques for robotic investigation and automated scientific data analysis. Field investigations with innovative robots in challenging environments is a hallmark of his experimental method.

Media Experience

CMU Leaves Marks on Mars  — Carnegie Mellon University
The partnership has created a pathway into the high bay in CMU's Gates Center for Computer Science. For years, students led by Robotics Institute Research Professor David Wettergreen (pictured at left) have tested wheels for rovers that have explored Mars. [...] "We did extensive tests to determine a baseline for design of the Perseverance wheel," said Wettergreen. "JPL tasked us with increasing the tractive performance — the slope climbing — and durability without increasing the wheel's mass."

Watch NASA’s new autonomous helicopter take flight on Mars  — Vox
“One of the fundamental constraints of any kind of space exploration — whether you’re going to Mars or Europa or the moon — is that you have limited bandwidth, which means a limit on the amount of information you can send back and forth,” David Wettergreen, research professor at Carnegie Mellon’s Robotics Institute, told Recode. “During the periods of time when the robot can’t communicate, autonomy is important for it to enable it to keep doing tasks, to explore on its own, to make progress, rather than just sitting there waiting for the next time it hears from us.”

NASA's Ailing Robonaut 2 Will Return from Space for Long-Overdue Repairs  — Space
"Errors in properly grounding circuits can lead to really strange symptoms that initially appear unrelated to the root cause," David Wettergreen, a roboticist at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, told IEEE Spectrum. "It can take a long time to debug because the problem is not easily reproducible and may not occur often, or even in the same way every time," said Wettergreen, who specializes in autonomous robots for planetary exploration. [In Photos: Robonaut 2, NASA's Robot Butler for Astronauts]

NASA begins testing drilling Mars rover in Chilean desert  — The Verge
Zoë is explicitly designed to search for signs of microbial life, which experts say would likely exist well below the Martian surface. "Direct evidence of life, if it exists, is more likely underground, beyond the current reach of rovers," David Wettergreen, research professor at Carnegie Mellon's Robotics Institute, said in a statement earlier this month. "Chances improve with greater depth but we are first developing one-meter capability and integrating with a mobile robot."

Rover Explores Chile Desert to Aid Mars Life Hunt  — Space
"Scientifically, the study helps us understand how life survives in extreme environments with implications to both Earth and Mars," said David Wettergreen, research professor in Carnegie Mellon’s Robotics Institute and principal investigator for the Life in the Atacama project. "Technologically, we are learning about the mechanisms and the algorithms that will enable us to explore the subsurface of other planets." [The Search for Life on Mars (A Photo Timeline)]