REU Site: Robots in the Real World

Robotics is an extremely multidisciplinary field that incorporates ideas from mechanical engineering, electrical engineering, computer science, and beyond. Roboticists must consider aspects of systems from mechanical design to planning to understanding the needs of people who interact with robots; as such, the broad range of skills needed to be a roboticist makes it both a challenging and enriching field for many undergraduates.

Despite this appeal, obstacles often interfere with undergraduate participation in robotics research, including lack of robotics infrastructure at home institutions and access challenges for groups of students who are underrepresented in engineering. Further, the research itself (which works with actual robotic systems in often real-world and/or long-term settings) is essential for robots to find adoption in day-to-day use cases.

This project seeks to continue the successful “Robots in the Real World” REU Site for a fourth iteration, making updates to particularly address the above diversity and inclusion topics, update methods for program applications and evaluations, and add a final presentation symposium.

Undergraduate students at this REU Site will work on active research projects, contributing to new findings in a wide range of robotics research areas, from modeling robots to understanding human psychology as it applies to interactions with robots. The summer project work will fall under the domains of Oregon State University robotics faculty and affiliates, and all projects will focus on robotics research contributions that involve physical robots deployed in real-world settings.

These projects include (but are not limited to) human-robot teaming for science exploration, robot-assisted older adult care, and next-generation robot grasping. The REU student experience will involve formulating and pursuing robotics research questions under the supervision of leading faculty in one of the top robotics programs in the country. Historically, over 50 program participants in this REU site have co-authored peer-reviewed academic papers that advanced the state of knowledge in the field based on their summer research.

This site is supported by the Department of Defense in partnership with the NSF REU program.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.