Starting out as the Carnegie Technical Schools in 1900, the Carnegie Mellon University is one of America’s top private research institutions. The institute then changed its name to Carnegie Institute of Technology in 1912 and offered four-year degree programs. Later, in 1967, it merged with the Mellon Institute of Industrial Research, thereby becoming the Carnegie Mellon University.
Today, the school is composed of seven colleges and several independent schools. The university ranks in the top 30 international universities. The university’s graduate program in computer science is ranked first, while its undergraduate engineering program is ranked 7th overall. Aside from its various colleges and schools, CMU also has notable research facilities, laboratories, institutes, and centers. One of these labs is the Robotics Institute which was founded back in 1979 and has conducted basic and applied research in the field of robotics technologies. It is the first robotics department in any American university and is involved in various projects, including the six legged Chiara robot that is an open source educational robot. Another robot is the CHIMP or the CMU Intelligent Mobile Platform robot which is a human-sized robot that was able to clear obstacles, open valves and even cut through walls at the DARPA Robotics Challenge Trails 2013.
