Aubrey Shick's furry robot blinks, giggles when petted, and moves on its own.
Shick, 29, of Squirrel Hill designed the robot, Romibo, to engage children with autism without the distracting and confusing body language and facial expressions of humans.
“Children with autism are often overwhelmed by all the complexities we take for granted and our abilities to just process them without thinking,” said Shick. “Romibo helps children with autism focus on the problem at hand instead of the social complexities.”
Romibo, like hundreds of other products, concepts or ideas, was spawned on Carnegie Mellon University's 100-acre Oakland campus. More than 300 companies have gotten their start there since the mid-1990s. The spinoff companies represent about a third of companies established in Pennsylvania based on university technologies in the past five years.
To read the original article: CMU continues to be an incubator of innovation | TribLIVE
