The number of robotics graduate and undergraduate programs has ballooned in recent years, with many top universities even offering a PhD program in robotics. Yet robotics, as a field, is new. It is a syncretic discipline which uses tools and ideas from traditional engineering fields like mechanical engineering, electrical engineering, computer science, statistics, and data science, but also synthesizes a broader scientific knowledge from fields such as psychology, kinesiology, linguistics, ethics, and more.

Workshop structure

Part I: What should a core robotics graduate curriculum contain?

Different robotics programs have different notions of core requirements. We invite robotics researchers, education researchers, robotics educators at the graduate and undergraduate levels, and industry stakeholders to join us in a half-day session of structured discussions on this topic.

• Each participant will be asked to briefly (3 min) introduce themselves, tell us what they expect to contribute to the conversation, and share what they hope to learn.
• After a few short talks from keynote speakers, we will divide into smaller groups, discuss, and meet in a combined format to synthesize the ideas.

Ideally, we will achieve enough of a consensus to produce a multi-author publication defining a core curriculum for robotics graduate programs.

Part II: How can we teach robotics to students with highly variable backgrounds?

Students come to robotics from a variety of backgrounds. Only a smattering of undergraduate robotics programs exist, meaning that most students come with a strong background in some required fields, and a minimal background in other fields.

• How can we teach a good foundation for graduate students coming from highly varied backgrounds?
• What are successful strategies?
• What are approaches that seem promising but have hidden pitfalls?

We invite education researchers and robotics educators at the graduate and undergraduate levels to join us in a half-day session of sharing our experiences and approaches to teaching robotics.

• Each participant will be asked to prepare a case study (10 min presentation; 3 pages PDF submitted in advance).

We will sort case studies into related sessions, each ending with a discussion to summarize lessons learned. The sessions will then combine to create an introduction and contextualize the case studies into a combined proceedings document, ideally to be published.

Confirmed Participants

Academia

Carlotta A. Berry, Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology

Bill Smart, Oregon State University

Paul M. Robinette, University of Massachusetts Lowell

Alli Nilles, Western Washington University

Industry

Lael Odhner, The AI Institute

David Rollinson, HEBI Robotics

Ryan Gariepy, Otto Motors

Contact information

• Ross Hatton [email protected]
• Shai Revzen [email protected]