Robotic visionary

Your car's global-positioning system probably wouldn't function as well as it does without a Holli-daysburg native's work with robots.

Red Whittaker - who went by "Larry" when his family lived on North Juniata Street - is the director of the Field Robotics Center at Carnegie Mellon University's Robotics Institute in Pittsburgh, where he lives with his wife, Kathleen.

Since 1983, Whittaker, 60, his colleagues and students have developed robots that do construction, underground and underwater work and hazardous cleanup, among other applications.

Whittaker's robots have roved on all seven continents and the North and South poles, crawled into the craters of a live volcano and cleaned a radioactive reactor after the 1979 Three Mile Island meltdown. But, he said, a robot's impact may go far beyond its immediate task.

For example, in 1986, Whittaker and his team built NavLab I, a mobile robot that was able to self-navigate through Pittsburgh's Schenley Park by using laser scanners and color video camera to provide NavLab I's view of the road. Later versions of NavLab included GPS - which lead to the improvement of the technology, Whittaker said.

"What NavLab did was realize that GPS was always going to show error .... and only give a position every once in awhile," he said. "That was not good enough to guide or steer the machine or keep it on a road, so NavLab used other methods like inertial sensing ... that could determine whether there was a small change in steering or velocity."

NavLab, he said, showed that GPS would do better as a guide for long-term positions.

"Most people won't remember it, but there was a time when GPS didn't exist," Whittaker said. "And satellites were not up in the sky, and it couldn't determine position within half a mile. I could see the future, and I could see that there was a way to use that for driving outdoor mobile machines. I could see that that would be a big thing for driving tractors, the construction business, family cars, military machines."

GPS isn't the only technology Whittaker and his team have influenced. Some of the technology used in specialized robots - such as underwater, flying or mining ones - can be traced to research at CMU.

"The first ideas and how to do it, how to automate those activities started here," he said. "But like any great development, it succeeds by propagating into the world. Everybody can understand that by looking backward, what has to be done is to first see the future and then make it happen."

It's that way of thinking that has led many in robotics to refer to Whittaker as a "visionary," said David Wettergreen, an associate research professor in the Robotics Institute. Wettergreen said he's collaborated with Whittaker for about 20 years.

"One of his greatest talents is to see right to the critical questions and crucial research issues," Wettergreen said. "He's very good at sorting out systems and determining what are the challenges and what we need to work on."

And he's always been that way, said his brother, Chuck Whittaker, who works with Red at the Ro-botics Institute, and a spinoff robotics firm, WorkHorse Technologies LLC. Chuck Whittaker, 52, credits some of his brother's success to the construction, surveying and railroad-shop jobs Red worked as a teenager.

"I think that helped him with the engineering base," Chuck Whittaker said. "He was always pushing the envelope education-wise. He was always very studious - geek-like, if you will - always very applied. He worked in those shops and around places in Hollidaysburg, and he got a lot of good experience in how things get done. You take those lessons along, no doubt about that."

It was that background, Whit-taker said, that led him to study civil engineering at Princeton.

''I have a lot of appreciation for the teachers and mentors in those professional and work settings, for the experiences from those early years,'' he said. ''Those are deeply seeded experiences that go beyond how you do things and ground a life experience in what's worth doing - and how does that engage and mix the world.''

A high school classmate, Dr. Patrick Barnes, said Whittaker's intelligence left an impression on him. Barnes was the 1966 class president for Hollidaysburg.

"He's probably the most intelligent guy I ever met, in all of my education," Barnes said. "He was destined for greatness in whatever field he chose. ... If I had to say anything about him, I'd say he was Princeton smart and Marine Corps tough -how's that for a combination?"

Whittaker took time off from his undergraduate work to serve in the U.S. Marine Corps, but returned to finish his degree and went on to earn both master's and doctoral degrees in civil engineering from CMU. In addition to his research work, he also teaches one graduate-level course per semester. Wettergreen was one of Whittaker's students - but their relationship has changed little since Wettergreen joined the faculty.

"There's not a Red for students and a Red for faculty," Wettergreen said. "He really treats everyone with a high degree of regard and works in a very collaborative manner with everyone."

The technology of each of Whittaker's robots builds on its predecessors. Lessons learned from NavLab I - the self-driving robot that improved GPS - are still being used to perfect the self-driving cars that Whittaker foresees someday becoming mainstream.

"These would be cars that are crash free," he said. "Automatic features can prevent many kinds of accidents, and 42 million people die in car accidents each year. These can prevent accidents that occur from drifting outside the lanes. ... So one of the features that will be available very soon are lane-keeping cars."

One of Whittaker's biggest projects is the Google Lunar X Prize, a competition challenging privately funded teams to be the first to send a robot to the moon, travel 500 meters and transmit video, images and data back to Earth.

Whittaker is leading Team Astrobotic, which includes leaders from CMU, the University of Arizona and Raytheon. Astrobotic's robot will be called Red Rover.

"China intends to go to the moon," he said. "Here in the U.S., it's sort of 'been there, done that,' but Japan intends to go to the moon, India intends to go to the moon, and the U.S. intends a huge campaign including a sustaining service station, like a space station, but on the moon."

The technology learned from a robot's trip to the moon may someday aid in a trip to Mars, Whittaker said.

"The real push is Mars, but Mars is too committing and too dangerous," he said. "It's a terribly committing experience that nobody knows anything about, so we can use the moon to build the equipment, test the equipment, and learn whether we can keep people out there doing things."