Manuela Veloso: RoboCup's Champion

Stepping out of the elevator on the seventh floor of Carnegie Mellon University's Gates Center for Computer Science, I'm greeted by an ungainly yet courteous robot. It guides me to the office of Manuela Veloso, who beams at the bot like a proud parent. Veloso then punches a few buttons to send it off to her laboratory a few corridors away. Veloso, a computer science professor at CMU, in Pittsburgh, has worked for over two decades to develop such autonomous mobile robots. She believes that humans and robots will one day coexist, and my robot escort, named CoBot (for Collaborative Robot), is one of her contributions to that future.