hundreds of students packed the center, with foot stomping,
clapping, and cheering for various entrants as they clawed
their way to various goals with balls or blocks in their maw.
At the final competition, cheers rang out for the most
outrageous robot or even the most spectacular failure. The
major difference in this competition was that the entrants
were not the students, but their robotic creations. These
events were, however, much more noteworthy iconic classics
that typified what has made MIT a world-renown institution
of basic and advanced science and engineering. A scene
from the 2008 competition is shown in Figure 2.
The rules and goals changed each year, as well as the
type of robot that each team constructed. These
competitions became so noteworthy that they were
frequently televised over network and public television
stations. Other schools and universities soon learned that
using robotic devices not only taught the many facets of
engineering in a hands-on manner, but the competitive
aspect honed the individual student’s ability to work within
a team to achieve the goal of the particular contest.
Since 1970, Flowers’ hands-on course has taught
gracious professionalism and has inspired many students to
go into the engineering field as first-rate engineers in
companies across the nation. No field of science course
would be complete without the accompanying lab sessions.
However, labs in the past followed a rigid outline geared to
the textbook. This innovative approach has now been
adopted by many universities with a similar strategy in
teaching technical subjects.
Worcester Polytechnic Institute’s
Robotics Curriculum
Earlier this year, I participated in an online NextGen
Education and Research Robotics Virtual Summit presented
by Robotics Trends’ Virtual Conference Series. Among the
many presenters who gave some very interesting talks and
the virtual booths who shared some interesting approaches
to education, there was a talk and booth by Worcester
Polytechnic Institute (WPI) in Massachusetts. Technical and
community colleges have offered courses in factory robot
implementation, maintenance, and operation for a number
of years. MIT, Stanford, and Carnegie Mellon, as well as
many other universities have long had courses leading to
advanced degrees in mechanical, computer, and electrical
engineering with strong emphasis upon robotics. However,
there are few actual degrees in robotics or robotics
engineering.
WPI feels that their series of Robotics Engineering
courses sets the way for those who desire to design and
manufacture robots for the many fields of this relatively new
science. As they state, “The robotics revolution is underway,
and a new breed of engineers is needed to face the
challenges that this exciting field represents. WPI, the leader
in project based education, continues its pioneering tradition
by developing the nation’s first Bachelor’s degree program
in Robotics Engineering. In addition, WPI also offers a
New Approaches To Robotics Education
FIGURE 2. The 2008 MIT ME 2.007 competition.
Master’s and Ph.D. in Robotics Engineering, with research in
sensing, control, manipulation, learning, interaction, and
medicine.”
WPI Robotics Team Took First
Place in 2009 NASA Competition
In the fall of 2009, the WPI sponsored robotics team
took home first place in NASA’s 2009 Regolith Excavation
Challenge at the NASA Ames Research Center in Mountain
View, CA. The challenge was to develop and demonstrate a
robotic device that could dig up simulated moon dust/soil
and deposit at least 150 kg of the material in a bin in 30
minutes or less. There were three prizes: $500,000 for first
(WPI); $150,000 for second; and $100,000 for third. The
WPI team, headed by Paul Ventimiglia — a WPI robotics
engineering major, beat 22 other teams by collecting and
depositing 439 kg of regolith in the collection bin.
Moonraker 2.0 shown in Figure 3 was built by
Ventimiglia’s team — Paul’s Robotics — that also consisted of
FIGURE 3. WPI
NASA robot.
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