 "When Uber wanted a team of roboticists, it raided a university lab")
In the centre of the lab, CHIMP stretched out one huge arm, then gracefully unfurled its three metal fingers, as if about to beckon someone. On its head, two rapidly rotating laser scanners enabled it to monitor its surroundings, but the engineers standing nearby were wary nonetheless. If the robot - a five-foot-tall, crimson-coloured humanoid machine designed to emulate the complex movements of the human body - moved suddenly and hit one of them accidentally in the chest, it could easily break some ribs. The contraption weighs 407 pounds and is powerful enough to bench-press 150 pounds.
"It's a hazard for humans to be around - we wear steel-toed boots," says Michael Vande Weghe one of the engineers building CHIMP for the National Robotics Engineering Center at Carnegie Mellon University. (CHIMP stands for "CMU Highly Intelligent Mobile Platform.") The robot is one the best-known creations to emerge from the centre.
The lab has come by its storied reputation by producing robot technology for clients like the American military and heavy-machinery manufacturers like John Deere and Caterpillar. Today the place is crammed with projects like "'Crusher", an armour-plated military robot that can find its own way across craggy, wooded terrain, and a smaller wheeled robot designed to explore mines for the company Anglo American. Plaques hanging along a wall commemorate some of the hundreds of patents received over the years by the centre's 100-person staff.
There was something missing from the lab today, though. In February, a group of some 40 employees - including several longtime senior lab members - resigned. They had been lured away, en masse, by a new employer: Uber.
The San Francisco firm, famous for its popular car-dispatch services, is getting into the robotics business itself. In February, barely a mile away, it opened the Advanced Technologies Center in Pittsburgh, where the former university researchers are now developing technologies to help Uber extend its reach over the roads. These include producing better maps and safer guidance systems - and most lucrative, even if they're still years away, Uber's very own fleet of self-driving cars.
It was a startling raid of talent. By offering private-sector salaries substantially higher than university equivalents (as well as a chance to earn equity in a fast-rising tech firm), Uber was able to acquire a hefty chunk of the centre's brain trust, including some top experts in autonomous vehicles. In doing so, the company has placed a bet that self-driving robots are no longer the stuff of scholarly visions but valuable intellectual property.
Carnegie Mellon's experience is a familiar one in the world of high-tech research. As a field matures, universities can wake up one day to find money flooding the premises; suddenly they're in a talent war with deep-pocketed firms from Silicon Valley.
Researchers who leave for industry are paid better, certainly, and often get sizable research budgets. But the intellectual register of their work changes. No more exploring hard, "basic" problems out of deep curiosity; they need to solve problems that will make their employers money. When the computer scientist Andrew Moore left Carnegie Mellon to become a vice-president of Google in 2006, his new job, he says, was to be "as useful as possible to someone trying to buy something".
By the late 2000s, the field of "wheeled robots" was taking off. Google had started its effort to make self-driving cars, and in 2007 roboticists at Carnegie Mellon won a military competition to produce a car that could navigate city streets; automakers were developing systems to help drivers stay in their lanes. A sort of Silicon Valley of robotics began to emerge in Pittsburgh as investors funnelled money to firms like 4Moms (which makes robotised strollers) and Aethon (robots that deliver supplies in hospitals), heavily staffed by former Carnegie Mellon robotics experts. Today, nearly a third of the university's faculty in the field are involved in a start-up on the side.
"If you're well versed in the area of robotics right now and you're not working on self-driving cars, you're either an idiot or you have more of a passion for something else," says Jerry Pratt, head of a robotics team in Pensacola that worked on a humanoid robot that beat Carnegie Mellon's CHIMP in this year's contest. "It's a multibillion- if not trillion-dollar industry."
This precise epiphany was dawning on many at the National Robotics Engineering Center. One was John Bares, who ran the lab from 1997 to 2010. Bares wanted to invent something and then sell it himself. In 2010, he left the centre to found a start-up, Carnegie Robotics. Within a year, his team built a robot that could detect land mines, which the army bought.
In 2014, Bares got an email from Uber that led to a meeting with its chief executive, Travis Kalanick. Kalanick said he planned to open a lab in Pittsburgh and told Bares that Uber's mission was to increase the efficient use of cars, which would have environmental benefits. Bares was persuaded, and in January this year he joined Uber. He knew that many of his former colleagues at Carnegie Mellon shared his entrepreneurial impulses.
Back at the lab, in fact, a group was already preparing to break away. One of Uber's recent hires from the National Robotics Engineering Center told me that he and his 20-person team had long found their lab work rewarding, but that they had been stunned by the rush of money into robotics in recent years: Google bought Nest, the Internet-connected thermostat firm, for $3.2 billion; Makerbot, a start-up that creates inexpensive 3-D printers, was acquired by another company for $604 million. "We were just flabbergasted," he says, adding that his team could have invented those products "in two weeks".
Then Bares made his own offer: Join Uber's new lab, where, he said, "their efforts would impact the world". The team would get bigger salaries, and Uber could produce their inventions quickly. The team leader agonised over the choice; he'd spent the last year dreaming of his own start-up. But he opted for Uber. "They have the road map, and they have the fuel," he told me. "They just need some tech. Here they are with an actual market for what we do."
The scale of Uber's recruitment surprised nearly everyone I spoke to. "I know of no place that was raided like that," says Julio Ottino, dean of the McCormick School of Engineering and Applied Science at Northwestern University. People at Carnegie Mellon did not want to talk about it; they declined even to confirm how many staff members had left.
Many familiar with Carnegie Mellon say the raid had a silver living, because it signals that the university is a hot place to work. One of those is Richard Florida, the urban-studies scholar who was a social scientist at Carnegie Mellon for years. "Pittsburgh has always been this caldron, but they couldn't get scale," Florida says. "What Uber provides is immediate scale." And funding: This month, the company announced a $5.5 million gift to Carnegie Mellon to support a new robotics chair and three fellowships.
©2015 The New York Times News Service
