Carnegie Mellon University

Our Facilities

NREC's facility features high bay assembly areas, electronic shops, with surface mount (SMT) capability and a fully-manned digital machine shop. The development environments include state-of-the-art analysis, simulation and design tools. NREC also boasts its own test site where several robots are analyzed and examined.

NREC occupies a 100,000 square foot renovated factory on a 6-acre site next to the Allegheny River in Pittsburgh, PA. Our world-renowned facility offers impressive amenities for developing, prototyping and testing robots.  It features two high bay assembly areas (28,000 and 14,000 SQ. ft.), overhead cranes with lifting capacity up to 10 tons, a thermal chamber, electronics shops with SMT capability, and a fully-manned digital machine shop with a CNC milling machine and lathe, welding equipment and water jet cutter.

NREC’s development environment includes state-of-the-art analysis, simulation and design tools. Our proximity to the main Carnegie Mellon campus allows us to work closely with our colleagues at the Robotics Institute.  

NREC External Test Sites

NREC maintains a number of sites to conduct testing, including 1 and 2-acre outdoor test areas at our main facility. Our off-site test areas range from 150 to 250 acres, enabling us to perform extensive testing over many different types of terrain in rugged environments and under extreme conditions. Our test sites cover a wide range of terrain including dirt roads, hills, ditches, steep slopes, vegetation, forests, etc.

Unimproved Roads

The National Robotics Engineering Center (NREC) external test site with unimproved roads.

Open Terrain

The National Robotics Engineering Center (NREC) external test site with open terrain.

Mine Site Replication

The National Robotics Engineering Center (NREC) on location test site with mine site replication.

NREC's Labs

The National Robotics Engineering Center (NREC) on location labs.