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 undergraduates join the already existing graduate program in a 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 department continues to add capacity and resources for students and faculty to push the boundaries of the field. New faculty like Patrícia Alves-Oliveira, who received a DARPA Young Faculty Award for her work on human-robot interaction in art, health, and education, represent the kind of interdisciplinary researcher the department was built to attract. A new 10,000-gallon research water tank, funded by the Office of Naval Research, allows students and faculty to design, build, and test autonomous underwater systems right next to their labs and classrooms. And resources like the MBot family of low-cost teaching robots continue to expand across the robotics curriculum, at Michigan and with partner schools, from introductory undergraduate courses to graduate-level work.
We are at a societal juncture, when robotics confronts the status quo in many fields and the public rightfully asks what a more automated future will mean: for jobs, for inequality, and for the quality of human interaction. These questions grow more urgent even as robots remain surprisingly limited in practice. Exoskeletons still can't seamlessly transition between walking, climbing stairs, and sitting down. Prosthetic legs still struggle to adapt to the shifting demands of daily life. And autonomous systems still face fundamental challenges in sensing and communicating underwater, in the air, and on unfamiliar terrain.
More than a decade ago, a team aware of these challenges set out to confront them with the goal of creating smart machines that serve society. They established the Robotics Institute. Today, their work continues as an entire Robotics Department, one that has grown into a national model for what robotics education and research can look like. Your gift to the Robotics Department Impact Fund will help us advance this mission, including:
Reinventing how we teach the foundations of engineering. The undergraduate program has transformed traditional math prerequisites into applied, robotics-driven courses. ROB 101: Computational Linear Algebra, first piloted in 2020, replaces four semesters of traditional calculus with the most impactful math for robotics, taught through hands-on projects like building maps from LiDAR data. A companion course, ROB 201: Calculus for the Modern Engineer, applies differential and integral calculus to real engineering problems like modeling robots and feedback control. All course materials, including lectures, textbooks, and projects, are published freely online.
Expanding access to robotics education nationally. Through the Distributed Teaching Collaboratives initiative, Michigan has partnered with four Historically Black Colleges and Universities (Morehouse College, Spelman College, Howard University, and Florida A&M University) as well as Berea College to co-teach robotics courses in a hybrid format. The effort now spans four courses and five partner schools. It's a model for unlocking talent nationwide.
Building open-source tools that unite the research community. The Open-Source Leg, a robotic lower-limb prosthesis developed at Michigan, received a $1 million NSF grant to expand its ecosystem, making standardized hardware and software freely available so researchers everywhere can study and compare prosthetic control strategies without the prohibitive cost of building their own device. The project has advanced to a second-generation design, and its team envisions it as the Linux of robotics research: democratizing access and accelerating breakthroughs. Meanwhile, the MBot teaching robot platform, designed at Michigan and used in eight courses, has been adapted through a custom Scratch interface to introduce elementary students to robotics concepts, a proof of concept tested with underserved students in Pontiac, Michigan.
Pioneering research across scales and disciplines. A cost-effective, open-source quadruped called "The Robot of Theseus" lets researchers swap 3D-printed limb segments to test how leg length and structure affect locomotion, helping biologists study questions about animal evolution that can't be isolated through animal experiments alone. Faculty are developing task-agnostic exoskeletons that can assist with walking, climbing stairs, and lifting without needing to know in advance what the wearer is doing. And new work in robotic eye surgery, AI-powered manufacturing, and brain-machine interfaces shows the breadth of what this department makes possible when you bring together experts from across disciplines.
Performing outreach that shares our enthusiasm and expands who gets to participate in robotics. In 2024, Robotics Outreach Ambassadors collectively logged over 1,000 hours of community service, and didn’t slow down in 2025: running Science Olympiad events, hosting Detroit high school students for hands-on experiences with quadruped robots and augmented reality, building robots with Girl Scouts, leading summer camps, and volunteering at adaptive sports events. The Michigan Engineering Zone in Detroit supports FIRST Robotics teams at 12 Detroit high schools. And the department regularly opens its doors with public tours of the Ford Motor Company Robotics Building (come see us!).
Robotics will be among the greatest technological influences on culture in our lifetimes. Help Michigan Robotics make that a positive influence. Thank you.
