Carnegie Mellon's National Robotics Engineering Center/Consortium already has a strong partnership with Pittsburgh FIRST and has been supporting our area FLL, as well as providing team support, training and workshops, mentors, and volunteers to FRC and our FTC start ups. CMU itself has an excellent, extremely in depth robotics initiative between the Robotics Institute, its Field Robotics Center (just celebrated 25 years in Field Robotics), NREC, and many specific well know projects (think Red Team). I encourage anyone who is interested to give CMU and Pittsburgh in general a look.
I'm actually in the process of also creating an alumni association in the Pittsburgh area considering so many FIRST alum are drawn to Carnegie Mellon for its strength in robotics. Please feel free to contact me at
jjankowitsch@usfirst.org if you have any questions about robotics opportunities at CMU, and of course ways to stay involved in FIRST in Pittsburgh!