by Sarah Bender
In honor of National Robotics Week, the University Archives is highlighting a valuable robotics resource preserved in its collections — the papers of SCS Founders University Professor Takeo Kanade.
Kanade is known for his extensive contributions to robotics studies and artificial intelligence. Multiple areas of robotics have benefitted from his work, including computer vision, autonomous mobile robots, medical robotics, and sensors. He has written more than 400 technical papers and reports in these areas, and holds more than 20 patents. He has also been the principal investigator of more than a dozen major computer vision and robotics projects at Carnegie Mellon.
He received his Doctoral degree in electrical engineering from Kyoto University in 1974. After holding a faculty position in the Department of Information Science at Kyoto University, he joined CMU's faculty in 1980, where he worked with the Computer Science Department and the Robotics Institute and also served as Director of the Robotics Institute from 1992 to 2001. Some of his work at CMU includes being a founding member of the Navigation Laboratory, or NavLab, focused on autonomous vehicles; co-creating the Direct Drive Arm, the first robotic arm with its joints attached directly to the rotors of the motors powering them; and working with doctors from the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center, later UPMC, to develop techniques for robotic surgery.
The collection is a part of more than 100 years of innovative and impactful CMU history in the University Archives, which is home to approximately 5,000 linear feet and 10TB of historic records and materials. These records include the General Photograph Collection, the Thistle yearbook, and C-MAP, Upward Bound, and SCOPP materials, along with papers of pioneering faculty like Kanade, Herb Simon, and Allen Newell, among others. Kanade’s papers are also included in The Robotics Project, a partnership between the Archives and the School of Computer Science dedicated to creating a home for robotics's past, present, and future.
The Takeo Kanade Papers were originally processed, or inventoried and sorted to make the information searchable, in 2004. Beginning in 2023, Robotics Project Interim Lead Archivist Kathleen Donahoe reprocessed the collection in order to incorporate new materials and update collection information. With reprocessing now complete, researchers on campus and beyond will find the collection is richer and easier to use than ever before.
The collection contains documentation of Kanade’s work at CMU, as well as records of different collaborators and partnerships outside of the university. There are publications, meeting minutes for advisory boards and presentations for corporations, planning notes from different conferences, and correspondence. The collection also includes videotapes, many of which are recordings from research projects.
Kanade’s papers are available in the Archives for use by researchers by appointment. Contact the Archives to schedule a visit, or see other collections during drop-in hours on Thursdays from 10:00 a.m. to 4:00 p.m.
