Professor William “Red” Whittaker recently lectured to the civil environmental engineering students.
The Professor is a National Academy of Engineering member and Fredkin Research Professor of Robotics in Carnegie Mellon’s Robotics Institute. His topic, ‘Robots at work on Earth and Beyond’, focused on the different projects, which he along with his team members had accomplished during the past decade. He had developed robots for identifying problems in the city sewers and a robot that could navigate and map dangerous coal mines among others.
Red Whittaker and a team of engineers are participating in the Google Challenge, building a robot that is anticipated to land on the moon.
According to Whittaker, initially even if you are not good but start before others is good enough. However, to succeed a lot of time meticulous efforts were required. Whole teams were needed to work a lot especially in the mechanics, software and electronic fields and come up with a number of ideas. He states that most of the people just start doing it without the necessary qualifications or certifications. The professor is also famed for his work during nuclear crises such as the Three Mile Island accident in 1979 and the Chernobyl disaster in 1986. The professor states that with such disasters, the resourceful nature of the humans comes to the fore and they try to do something to help.
The Professor has helped develop automated cranes, which pour concrete over to prevent surface contamination; the Pioneer, which performed recon and recovery work; and the Remote Reconnaissance Vehicle, which gave the world the video footage of the flooded basement of the reactor, which was damaged. He and team were asked to create a machine to cleanup the area during the Three-Mile incident and after surveying the site wooden models were developed that explained what could be done. Immediately afterwards, he received a contract in October 1983 for the work. According to Whittaker, a robot’s most important feature was mobility and he states that tools would have a meaning only if they perform the way one wants them to.
Recently, he worked on space exploration and autonomous car designs. Before three years he and his team Tartan Racing had been awarded the 2007 Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency Grand Challenge, which was a $2 million contest for the design of an autonomous vehicle. Currently, Whittaker is the Chief Technical Officer and Chairman of Astrobotic Technology, which focuses on Commercial Space Enterprise. This company is one of the 29 teams, which is competing in the $20 million Google Lunar X Prize wherein a robot would be sent to the Moon and send data about the moon’s surface to the Earth. Whittaker reveals that this robot includes software and sensors, which are normally seen in race vehicles. It was one monolithic piece with one thruster. He plans on launching it in December 2013. He says that it was not enough to just get 99% right but to succeed everything has to be just right.
He has also created robots for everyday applications such as the automatic brakes in the new car models. According to him, money was not the reason for everything.