The Laboratory's affiliations within Carnegie Mellon University include the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering , the Robotics Institute , the Institute for Complex Engineered Systems , and the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering . Research within the Advanced Mechatronics Laboratory focuses on the idea of Rapidly Deployable Intelligent Systems. The main threads of this research are composition , collaboration , task management , and adaptation . Composition is the construction of a system from a set of primitive components. These primitive components may be a heterogeneous mix of hardware, software, mechatronic, or virtual agents.
Collaboration is the ability of components to manage their interactions in order to achieve a goal.
Task management extends this idea and looks at the problem of translating the high level goals of an entire system into lower level goals for each component within system. The vision of those within the Advanced Mechatronics Laboratory is that a system built with primitive components that are readily composable, that are capable of collaboration, that support the AML task management model, and that exhibit adaption can be deployed rapidly and confidently. This approach will enable engineers to build systems two orders of magnitude more complex than current systems and deploy them two orders of magnitude faster than current systems. The Advanced Mechatronics Laboratory is currently exploring these concepts through projects in Distributed Information Systems, Distributed Robotics Systems, Distributed Design Systems, Intelligent Instruments, Sensor Based Robotics, Reconfigurable Systems and Adaptive Software.