Home >  Business

Defending Roboburgh

Thursday, June 13, 2002

By Dan Fitzpatrick, Post-Gazette Staff Writer

The hinges on Pittsburgh's long-dormant robotics industry are creaking to life. After the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, the Army announced it would spend $34 billion remaking its battlefield with unmanned robotic vehicles, and Pittsburgh's Carnegie Mellon University quickly joined the Army's lead research team as a subcontractor.

Now, the Pittsburgh Regional Alliance and CMU are forming a new agency, called the National Center for Defense Robotics, to ensure that at least some of that new robotics design, engineering and manufacturing work occurs in Pittsburgh.

"There is going to be $34 billion spent," said Chuck Thorpe, director of the CMU Robotics Institute. "All we have to do is capture a small fraction of that and it would make a huge impact on this region."

To make room for that potential production work, the Regional Industrial Development Corp. is paying $1.3 million for an unused 25-building manufacturing plant in Lawrenceville, not far from the NASA-funded and CMU-operated National Robotics Engineering Consortium. RIDC's plan is to renovate the old Heppenstall Co. complex for $13 million and lease the space to robotics firms.

Pittsburgh, dubbed "Roboburgh" by The Wall Street Journal in 1999, has long flirted with the promise of robotics, first through automated transit work done by the former Westinghouse Electric Corp., which started CMU's Robotics Institute in 1979 with a $5 million grant. CMU, now considered among the world leaders in robot research, is a consistent source of brainpower for the Department of Defense, assisting with everything from the development of robotic helicopters to Marine reconnaissance vehicles to sensors that act as the eyes and ears of a robot, warning soldiers about smooth or rough terrain.

"When it is time to do the research, everyone wants Carnegie Mellon on their team," Thorpe said.

But CMU's expertise has not always meant jobs for Pittsburgh. Robotics firms still employ a minuscule percentage of the Pittsburgh work force, and many of CMU's robotics graduates leave the region for robotics-related jobs elsewhere, frustrated by the lack of opportunities and the slow pace of Pittsburgh robotics work.

The job of turning that situation around now belongs to the newly formed National Center for Defense Robotics. It will be based in the Lawrenceville offices of incubator Pittsburgh Gateways Corp. and headed by O'Hara technology consultant Bill Thomasmeyer, a former technology entrepreneur hired by the PRA last year to formulate a regional robotics strategy. Partners include the PRA, CMU, the University of Pittsburgh, Penn State University, Pittsburgh Gateways and a nonprofit known as Catalyst Connections.

The center's goal is to make Pittsburgh a leader in mobile robotics. It plans to raise federal money and hand out robotics contracts, using the work to persuade major defense contractors to build design centers and manufacturing facilities in the Pittsburgh region.

Thomasmeyer expects the center's budget for the first 18 months to be about $1.5 million, paid by state, foundation and private sources. For 2004, he is seeking about $9 million from the federal government.

Concurrently, the Bush administration is asking for nearly $400 billion in military spending for 2003, which is 15 percent higher than the country's average annual budget during the Cold War. In the next four years, the federal government is proposing to spend $2.1 trillion on the military, focusing much of the new spending on precision weapons, missile defenses, unmanned vehicles and high-tech equipment for soldiers in the field.

As part of that spending, the Defense Department and the Army are pursuing a $34 billion project known as the "Future Combat Systems" that officials hope will lead to vehicles that can travel through sniper fire or hit an intended target from 80,000 feet away. CMU recently landed work on the research phase of the so-called FCS project as a subcontractor to Northrop Grumman subsidiary Remotec, which in turn is acting as a subcontractor to the lead FCS team of Boeing Co. and Science Applications International Corp.

Despite CMU's work, Thomasmeyer is worried because, "The region has a history of letting these types of opportunities slip through its fingers." He described the example of the Jeep, which was invented by a Butler County-based company that subsequently lost the manufacturing contract to a company in Toledo, Ohio. "That is the classic example of what we want to try to avoid this time around."

Among Thomasmeyer's goals now are to persuade at least three major defense contractors to build development and engineering centers in the region within the next 18 months. He also wants the U.S. military to open at least one unmanned vehicle program office in the region within the next three years, and hopes to attract a major unmanned vehicle manufacturing plant to the region in the next five years.

With CMU in Pittsburgh's back yard, "I would rate our chances as good [as] or slightly better than anyone else," Thomasmeyer said. "But we can't rest on that; we have to take action and do it fairly quickly."

National Robotics Engineering Consortium director John Bares likes Thomasmeyer's strategy but warns that instead of going after tank manufacturing plants, the Pittsburgh region should pursue robotics production firms that match CMU's expertise in automation components, sensors, controllers and software. "I think it makes sense to focus on areas where we can add value," he said.

"Can we do it?" Bares asked. "Can we be successful? If we look ahead five years from now, will we have military contracts? Sure. Will we be huge in this area as we hoped? I don't know. That is the question."