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The College of Engineerings new undergraduate program in robotics will empower students to practice the full spectrum of robotics including underwater, wheeled, legged, flying and medical robots at the 134,000-square-foot Ford Motor Company Robotics Building.

The program is available for fall 2022 enrollment following state approval from the Michigan Association of State Universities on June 2. The U-M Department of Robotics is a first among top 10 engineering schools.

According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, the demand for qualified robotics professionals grew by more than 13% in 2018 alone, and up to 80% of U.S. industrial employers are facing difficulties filling vacancies for highly skilled technical professionals, including robotics, computer vision, artificial intelligence and motion control.

The global industrial and service robotics markets are expected to grow by more than 20% year over year, reaching a total market of $310 billion by 2025.

As our society grows, theres an unmet demand for people skilled in robotics, and Michigan Engineering is poised to help fill this void as a leader in this space, said Alec D. Gallimore, the Robert J. Vlasic Dean of Engineering, and the Richard F. and Eleanor A. Towner Professor of Engineering, an Arthur F. Thurnau Professor and professor of aerospace engineering.

The colleges robotics department will produce deeply trained roboticists who put people first, collaborating across disciplines to solve complex issues affecting the state of Michigan, our nation and the world at large.

The new program features an inclusively designed curriculum with more than 30 course offerings, providing exposure to technologies that were inaccessible for most undergraduate students a decade ago. These include 3D printing for rapidly prototyping new robot designs and high-speed laser scanning that enables simultaneous localization and mapping.

As tools have become widely available, they can now be rolled out at the undergraduate level. The curriculum centers on how an embodied intelligence senses, reasons, acts and works with humans covering topics in electronics, mechanisms, computation, mathematical foundations and human-robot interaction.

As companies try to prevent bias from entering their technologies, the need for a talented pool of roboticists who are both highly skilled and equity-centered is vital to help avoid unfair discrimination against citizens, patients, customers and job applicants.

The undergraduate programs focus on interdisciplinary collaboration and social awareness, in addition to excellence in science and technology, will enable students to design people-first solutions to societys challenges.

The University of Michigan has a remarkable ecosystem of academics, enabling our robotics faculty and students to work collaboratively across disciplines with far reaching societal contributions, said Provost Laurie McCauley.

Recently, the department announced Dawn Tilbury, associate vice president for research-convergence science at U-M, will serve as the first chair of the Department of Robotics. She also is the Herrick Professor of Engineering, professor of mechanical engineering and professor of electrical engineering and computer science.

Tilbury, who recently led the National Science Foundation Directorate of Engineering, helped lay the foundation for the convergence of disciplines that defines robotics research at the university. She played a leading role in establishing Michigans Robotics Institute and noted the opportunity for faculty and students at the department to push the boundaries of the field.

Robotics has so much potential because it really brings together so many different engineering disciplines biomedical, computer science, electrical, industrial, mechanical, aerospace, and naval architecture and marine engineering, Tilbury said. Michigan roboticists will possess the knowledge and skills to develop robotics that help people across a multitude of arenas whether thats within their workplace, home or community.

The College of Engineering last year announced the creation of its new robotics department, which will be an evolved adaptation of the U-M Robotics Institute. In fall 2020, the institute began piloting courses centered around providing excellent engineering instruction and equal opportunity for students.

The Robotics 101 course quickly exposes students to advanced robotics through the theory and computational applications of linear algebra instead of calculus, since not every undergraduate attended a high school that offered calculus.

This course enrolls students at historically Black colleges and universities, including Morehouse and Spelman, who have a pathway to receive a U-M engineering degree. The Robotics 102 course includes undergraduates at Kentuckys Berea College, serving mostly Appalachian students.

The outreach to historically excluded populations is reflective of the departments commitment to diversity, equity and inclusion and the colleges equity-centered engineering framework.

I know that if we dont have equitable representation in our research labs and classrooms, we wont have equitable representation among our development teams, executive suites and policymakers who are thinking about these life-changing technologies, said Chad Jenkins, associate director of undergraduate programs at the Michigan Robotics Institute and a professor of electrical engineering and computer science.

We just want to do right by the people who are on our campus and across the country so we can help extend the ladder of opportunity.

Originally posted here:

Undergraduate robotics program starts enrollment this fall | The University Record - The University Record

A team of Seattle University seniors who tackled a problem for Kenworth Truck Co., from left: Matthew Miramon, Jackson Christian, James Finnestad, faculty advisor Dr. Yen-Lin Han, Kayla Smith, Paula Fijolek and Daniel Lee. (GeekWire Photo / Lisa Stiffler)

Technology moves so fast, it can be difficult to teach computer science and engineering students the very latest in their fields. So Seattle University tries to make sure its grads learn to learn.

On Friday, students presented year-long projects done in partnership with Northwest organizations from corporations including Amazon, Microsoft and F5 Networks to community groups, government departments, and small businesses such as Seattle City Light, a nonprofit called Maris Place for the Arts, and Redmond Dudes Baseball to help solve their computer science and engineering problems.

Now in its 35th year, Seattle Us Project Center assigned roughly 180 seniors and masters degree students to 40 teams to work on the projects.

Students are faced with a technological challenge that they dont know the answer to, said Rachael Brown, director of the Project Center.

Senior Mason Adsero was on one of three teams that partnered with Kenworth Truck Co., a subsidiary of Bellevue, Wash.-based PACCAR. Their project used machine learning to develop a more efficient process for managing the customization of trucks to meet customers needs. They trained their model on Kenworths engineering database and used Tableau software for visualizing the results. They met via Zoom almost weekly with liaisons from Kenworth.

It was a tech stretch for the students.

It was pretty overwhelming at first, said Adsero. We were all in deep water.

But the team members said they were successful in creating a working model that theyll be handing over to Kenworth.

In addition to exploring new tech challenges, the students said that the projects were an opportunity to work in teams; communicate and receive feedback from partner organizations that act as customers; do project management; set schedules and goals; and practice giving presentations.

It gives them an experience that makes them a more well-rounded professional before they even graduate college, Brown said.

Participants included students from Computer Science, Civil and Environmental Engineering, Environmental Science, Mechanical Engineering, and Electrical and Computer Engineering departments.

It gives them an experience that makes them a more well-rounded professional before they even graduate college.

Each team had at least one liaison from the partnering organization or sponsor plus a faculty advisor.

Larger sponsor organizations pay a fee to participate in the program, while smaller businesses or nonprofits engage for free or pay a smaller amount. The sponsors are able to keep software, devices and other intellectual property created by the effort.

Amazon has collaborated with the Seattle U students since 2001.

Participating in Seattle Us Projects Day gives Amazon the opportunity engage with smart, ambitious science and engineering students who will soon be looking for jobs, said Drew Herdener, Amazons vice president of Worldwide Communications, by email.

The company sponsored six teams this year. That included multiple cloud projects, such as one to classify AWS Partner Network data and another that built a tool for developers to manage workflow, as well as creating technology for monitoring its data centers servers.

So does the company actually use the products generated by the students?

Generally speaking and most often, the students projects are proof of concept and do help us determine if a particular program has promise and how it could be executed, Herdener said.

Profiles of all of the projects can be found here. Keep reading for descriptions of three more teams:

Beavers build dams in some inconvenient places for humans, causing flooding of farmlands, homes and roadways. A three-student team studied the impact of devices called pond levelers to regulate the amount of water stored behind a dam, and the ability of salmon to navigate the dams at different water levels.

The team built their own devices for remotely monitoring water levels every 15 minutes and deployed them at four dam sites. While the students successfully collected data, there were still unanswered questions for the project, so Seattle U applied for and received a grant to continue the work over the summer.

Seniors Ruby Raoa and Lailan Uysaid the project was difficult but rewarding.

When you plan for field work, you think its going to go well, Uy said. But whatever can go wrong will. When you get out there, you have to problem solve a lot, she added.

Officials with Seattles St. James Cathedral were eager to work with students to develop plans to reduce their energy use and work toward carbon neutrality. The Catholic church participated in the Seattle U program a decade ago to take initial steps towards energy efficiency.

The real impetus for this year was recognizing the climate crisis is ramping up, and how can we as a cathedral better care for our resources and the earth, said Patrick Barredo, St. James director of social outreach and advocacy.

Officials with the 115-year-old cathedral had regular Zoom meetings with the students. The team visited the site on multiple occasions, poured over utility bills, analyzed existing equipment and measured the interior spaces.

The students will provide St. James with a final report, and officials said their first step will be installing a new control system to optimize heating of the facility. Future plans could include switching over to electric heat pumps and kitchen appliances, and perhaps installing solar and electric vehicle charging sites.

The hope, Barredo said, is the cathedral will be a model for other churches.

Daniel Lees six-student team took on the task of developing monitoring hardware, software and a test platform for Kenworth for measuring the efficiency of its electric truck batteries.

The experience provided lots of learning opportunities, Lee said, including project management and scheduling because we all have busy schedules and we needed so many pieces to come together at once.

But that wasnt all. The seniors also learned quickly solving problems that came up because we had a few fires and explosions from the electronics, he said. The team worked through their challenges and created a prototype that could be a model for use with different vehicles.

It was really nice, Lee said, being able to apply everything weve learned throughout our four years into an actual product that would actually make a difference, eventually.

More here:

Seattle U students tackle real-world computer and engineering projects for Amazon, F5 and others - GeekWire