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Carnegie Mellon University – Robotics Innovation Center

Pittsburgh, USA

º£½ÇÊÓƵ worked with Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) to shape the vision, space program, and operating model for the Robotics Innovation Center, a major new facility that redefines how the university conceives, tests, and advances robotics research.

Our value lay in establishing a clear roadmap for a highly flexible environment in which interdisciplinary teams of CMU faculty, staff, and students as well as industry partners can work fluidly across indoor, outdoor, and aquatic settings, moving rapidly from concept to prototype to real‑world testing.

This project extends our longstanding partnership with the university, following our earlier work on the Richard King Mellon Hall of Sciences, and reinforces CMU’s ambition to create research environments that adapt to emerging technologies and support a vibrant culture of collaboration. Located off campus at Hazelwood Green, a redevelopment of a former steelworks, the Robotics Innovation Center sits alongside another º£½ÇÊÓƵ project, the Roundhouse at Hazelwood Green, situating the facility within a growing innovation district that bridges the university with Pittsburgh’s industrial heritage and future‑facing economy.

We enabled CMU to establish an off‑campus innovation zone for full‑scale testing and industry collaboration.

We shaped an innovative program that aligned space with real research behaviors and allocated space by project rather than by person, enabling long‑term flexibility.

Our team created a clear operational vision through deep stakeholder engagement, helping the university define priorities and make confident early decisions.

Our experts structured a modular planning framework that allows labs, shops, and project spaces to reconfigure quickly as research directions evolve.

Challenge

The Robotics Innovation Center was conceived to enable work that cannot easily take place within a traditional campus environment. This ambition introduced several interconnected challenges. The university required spaces capable of hosting large‑scale, experimental research that spans robotics for land, air, water, and hybrid environments. These activities involve equipment of significant size, demand controlled conditions for safety, and rely on rapid iteration between development, fabrication, and testing. The design therefore had to accommodate a diversity of zones, including high bay and low bay project areas, wet spaces and research labs, specialist shops, and a motion capture suite, all linked seamlessly to a substantial outdoor running room where researchers can test full‑scale autonomous systems.

The emerging field of robotics evolves quickly, and the facility needed to remain relevant for technologies, methods, and collaborations that have not yet been imagined – including with industry partners who can work side-by-side and integrated with CMU teams. This called for a degree of operational and spatial flexibility that extends beyond conventional academic buildings. Spaces needed to be reconfigurable at multiple scales, shifting from one research theme to another as teams and technologies change. Achieving this demanded a structured approach to programming that could anticipate future needs while avoiding unnecessary fixed elements that would compromise adaptability.

The site at Hazelwood Green presented its own complexities. As a major industrial brownfield site undergoing transformation, the area is guided by a detailed development framework that shapes frontage, height, transparency, and circulation requirements. At the same time, the site’s topography, historic ground conditions, and stormwater considerations required careful integration of the building and outdoor test environments.

The Robotics Innovation Center also occupies a highly visible position along the Hazelwood Green plaza, where it must contribute positively to the public realm while maintaining secure research operations and robust logistical access. Finally, the university wanted the facility to support its civic mission.

The center needed to welcome industry partners, community groups, students of all ages, and visiting researchers, while providing opportunities to observe robotics in action in a manner that is safe, engaging, and aligned with CMU’s educational role. Balancing openness with operational security added another layer of complexity to the brief.

Solution

º£½ÇÊÓƵ’s role across both project phases was to bring clarity, structure, and shared purpose to a highly aspirational vision. During the initial feasibility phase with GBBN Architects, we led an extensive program of stakeholder engagement that involved faculty, researchers, students, industry partners, and university leadership. Through interviews, workshops, and scenario testing, we helped define the range of activities the building must support and established a coherent model for how people would work across disciplines and research modalities.

From this foundation, we developed a population‑based space program that aligned space needs with users and activities rather than departmental ownership. This shift supported the university’s intent to allocate space by project, ensuring that the facility could adapt as research evolves. We translated this into planning principles that emphasized modularity, standardisation, and flexibility. An 11ft planning module provided the underlying framework for wet and dry labs, makerspaces, low bay areas, and workspace environments, allowing these zones to be reconfigured as research priorities change. Generous floor‑to‑floor heights and a central high bay reinforced this adaptability while creating a shared heart for large‑scale experimentation.

As the project moved into design development with Perkins Eastman, º£½ÇÊÓƵ continued refining the program and thinking through operations through targeted workshops and detailed validation. This process confirmed technical requirements for specialist elements such as the research tank, drone cage, motion capture suite, and advanced shop facilities. It also helped recalibrate the balance between high bay and low bay spaces, expand building support and storage capacity, and introduce additional collaborative and incubator environments.

The adjacency strategy became a defining feature of the facility. The building wraps around a central high bay, with direct links to the outdoor running room, enabling smooth movement between fabrication, assembly, and full‑scale testing. The running room itself is structured as a series of distinct terrains, including large and small test fields, an amphibious zone, an agricultural plot, and controlled environments for aerial systems. This allows research teams to test robots across multiple conditions without leaving the site.

Value

º£½ÇÊÓƵ’s involvement provided CMU with a clear and actionable vision for a facility that blends flexibility, functionality, and ambition. By grounding the program in real user needs and research behaviors, we helped the university articulate a compelling case for investment and a framework that guided the project from early concept through design. This alignment amongst stakeholders ensured that the Robotics Innovation Center remained focused on enabling world-class research that bridges fundamental discovery and practical application.

The population‑based program and modular planning strategy give the facility long‑term resilience, allowing CMU to adapt to new research directions, partnerships, and technologies without major reconstruction. The interconnected indoor and outdoor environments accelerate the research cycle by reducing friction between development and testing, supporting faster iteration and more integrated workflows.

The strong civic interface, shaped through careful architectural and operational planning, helps the university share its work with the wider community and strengthens Hazelwood Green’s evolution as a hub for innovation.

The Robotics Innovation Center stands as a testament to how thoughtful engagement, strategic programming, and a clear operational vision can translate a complex set of aspirations into a workable, future‑ready facility. For CMU, it marks a significant expansion of capability and a visible commitment to shaping the next era of robotics research.