UA Engineering to Host Robotics Summer Research Experience

TUSCALOOSA, Ala. – The University of Alabama College of Engineering will host a robotics research program for undergraduates this summer.

Two interns will be selected from participating Historically Black College and University schools to take part in the Advancing Robotics Technology for Societal Impact Summer Research Experience for Undergraduates program.

These interns will be exposed to new robotics curriculum and will work on teams of sensor-enabled mobile robots that communicate to efficiently monitor a region of interest.

Students will be involved with multi-robot cooperative search applications, and they will learn how to program and test autonomous robot controllers for high-end and low-end robot platforms, like K-team Koalas and iRobot Creates.

“This is an exceptional opportunity for undergraduate students to develop a deeper appreciation for the emerging robotics field by working on cooperative search and surveillance algorithms in a lab setting,” said Dr. Monica Anderson, assistant professor of computer science at UA.

All research will be conducted in the Distributed Autonomy lab, which researches how to use teams of robots to accomplish high-level tasks. Appropriate shared representations and communications paradigms are tested in simulation and in a lab environment.

In addition, the program will provide training for faculty at Historically Black College and Universities on robot hardware and controller development through hands-on workshops.

The Advancing Robotics Technology for Societal Impact, known as ARTSI, Summer Research Experience for Undergraduates program is open to ARTSI students who are U.S. citizens or permanent residents, and who will not yet have completed their undergraduate degree at the time they begin their summer internship.

The ARTSI alliance is a collaborative education and research project concerning robotics for healthcare, the arts and entrepreneurship. The organization aims at increasing the number of African Americans who study computer science and robotics in college, and increasing the number of faculty at Historically Black College and Universities who educate students in robotics.

In 1837, The University of Alabama became one of the first five universities in the nation to offer engineering classes. Today, UA’s fully accredited College of Engineering has more than 2,300 students and more than 100 faculty. In the last seven years, students in the College have been named USA Today All-USA College Academic Team members, Goldwater scholars, Hollings scholars and Portz scholars.