Our bet on the need for expanded educational opportunities in robotics is proving true: we are now close to 200 current declared undergraduate majors after launching the program in Fall 2022.
This follows creating the first Robotics Department among top-ten engineering schools in 2021. These first undergraduates join the already existing graduate robotics program in the new department that defines robotics as a discipline, teaching students the skills needed to help drive a rapidly expanding field.
"The easy problems have been solved,” says Michael Gonzalez, who recently earned a Robotics PhD. “Now the interesting problems require knowledge about mechanics, electronics, computing, and human-centric design, in a more interdisciplinary approach than most other fields.”
The new department adds more capacity and resources for students and faculty to move the field of robotics forward.
New resources such as the Mbot family of teaching robots that are low cost and adaptable to curriculums, from undergraduate to graduate courses.
We are at a societal juncture, when robotics confronts the status quo in many fields and the public rightfully fears the consequences of a more automated future: loss of jobs, increased inequality, and dehumanized interactions. These worries pervade even as robots remain rudimentary in real life compared to our imaginations. Roombas struggle to vacuum our floors without getting stuck, autonomous cars fail to see and react to their environments, and prosthetics cannot quickly adapt to a wearer’s biomechanics and intentions.
More than a decade ago a team aware of these issues set out to confront them with the goal of creating smart machines that serve society. They established the Robotics Institute. And today, their work continues as an entire Robotics Department. On Giving Blueday, you can help us advance our mission by making a gift to the Robotics Department Discretionary Fund. Your gift will help recruit researchers who bridge the traditional engineering disciplines and include medicine, humanities, social sciences, architecture, design, and law, including:
- Developing an undergraduate program that will transform a “Sputnik-era” sequence of math courses into a new combination of linear algebra and calculus. The first pilot course, ROB 101, was taught in 2020, and now close to 1,000 students from other institutions have used our undergraduate courses as part of a distributed curriculum effort. Similar distributed teaching efforts are expanding across our new robotics curriculum.
- Developing the open source leg, an artificially intelligent lower limb prosthetic that can be built for a fraction of the cost of similar models, with a full parts list and assembly instructions freely available. This can unite researchers around a common platform for prosthetics that requires very little investment or hardware expertise.
- Performing outreach focused on sharing our enthusiasm and the possibilities of robotics to a multitude of groups, from FIRST Robotics teams to elementary school classrooms.
Robotics will be the greatest technological influence on culture in history. Help Michigan Robotics make that a positive influence. Thank you.
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