The Robotics Program

The Robotics program welcomed its first class of students in Fall 2014!  Robotics is part of an interdisciplinary effort to bring together the many disciplines that contribute to research on robotics. Robotics is the design, creation, analysis, and use of embodied computational systems that interact with the physical and human environment. The study of robotics and its place in the world draws on many fields of engineering, including computer science, mechanical engineering, artificial intelligence, computer vision, electrical engineering, control systems, human-robot/computer interaction, and biomedical engineering.  Robotics will integrate knowledge from these fields for applications to Robotics.

U-M Robotics currently offers Masters and PhD degrees. Both programs share a common set of course requirements. PhD students must additionally complete a set of qualifying exams to become PhD candidates, and then complete a thesis.

This program will have three main core technical areas. These three areas are integrated in order to implement a functioning robot: (l) Sensing of the environment, external agents, and internal body information to determine state information, (2) Reasoning with that information to make decisions for guidance, control, and localization, and (3) Acting upon the body and environment to produce motion or other outputs that enable the robot to locomote or interact with the environment. Each of these areas may be considered a subplan for coursework and research study. The goal of the proposed Robotics Program is to train students to be independent researchers and engineers, and future leaders in robotics research, in academia, industry and government.