Defining the Discipline of Robotics for Excellence and Equity through Humanoid Robotics

Abstract

Start with a simple question: What is the best degree program for a student to become a roboticist? At the core of the mission of higher education, an undergraduate major defines the intellectual organization for its academic discipline to produce “people and ideas.” In my role leading the robotics undergraduate program at Michigan, we tackled this question through the curricular challenge of how to both: 1) educate people to put ideas of the robotics discipline into practice and 2) endow them with the intellectual lens for creating new ideas that extend the frontiers of the robotics discipline -- where mobility and dexterity through humanoid robots is poised to have a transformative impact on our world.

I will present the design, launch, and innovations for the Michigan Robotics Major, our progress toward realizing humanoid mobile manipulation robots, and our Distributed Teaching Collaboratives model for open-source course development. Launched in 2022 as part of our larger Robotics Pathways model, the Michigan robotics major serves to enable successful and sustained career-long participation in robotics, AI, and automation professions. Building on our guiding principle of “Robotics with Respect” -- the Michigan robotics major was designed to define robotics as a true academic discipline with both equity and excellence as our highest scholarly priorities. Our research into advanced perception and planning with the Agility Robotics Digit robot will be presented toward realizing the longstanding vision of taskable autonomous humanoid robots capable of mobile manipulation tasks in common human environments. Our Distributed Teaching Collaboratives uses the "classroom as a catalyst" for building equitable partnerships between Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs) and R1 Research Universities and broadening pathways to advanced graduate study in robotics and AI.