Carnegie Mellon University’s Robotics Innovation Center has secured its first tenant ahead of the $100 million facility’s opening celebration Friday.
California-based FieldAI will establish a small lab and office suite in the 150,000-square-foot building, the university announced Monday. The Robotics Innovation Center is located at Hazelwood Green, site of a former steel mill turned high-tech hub.
Crews broke ground on the facility in 2023. It sits just east of the university’s existing manufacturing and research hub within Mill 19, a Regional Industrial Development Corp.-owned project also at Hazelwood Green.
FieldAI has developed an artificial intelligence “brain” that makes machines autonomous. Its product can power anything from side-by-side vehicles to humanoids, allowing robots to handle tasks considered too dull or dangerous for people.
On the less extreme side, dog-like robots loaded with FieldAI technology can monitor progress on a construction site. But as CMU noted in its press release Monday, the software could also enable machines to navigate nuclear cleanup sites.
These machines will be tested indoors and outdoors at the Robotics Innovation Center.
FieldAI formally launched in 2023, but its founding team started developing autonomous systems for a NASA cave exploration project in 2016.
The Pittsburgh branch will be run by Sebastian Scherer, a CMU robotics professor who’s been with the company for about a year.
Audrey Russo, president and CEO of the Pittsburgh Technology Council, emphasized the importance of a company valued at around $2 billion choosing to expand into the city.
“It is not a courtesy — it is a calculation,” Russo said in a statement. “They are here because the talent, the CMU research infrastructure and the faculty paired with the depth of this robotics ecosystem are unmatched.”
Hazelwood Green is also home to the University of Pittsburgh’s BioForge building, a 185,000-square-foot work in progress where Massachusetts-based cell and gene therapy manufacturer ElevateBio will serve as the main tenant.
ElevateBio won’t begin its Pittsburgh operations until early next year.
Both the BioForge building and Robotics Innovation Center received significant funding from the Richard King Mellon Foundation.
