07/12/2024
By Brooke Coupal

Students aspiring to work in robotics can venture down multiple paths to reach their goal, from computer science and electrical engineering to fabrication.

RoboXploration, a new summer camp hosted at the UMass Lowell New England Robotics Validation and Experimentation (NERVE) Center, is introducing middle school students to those disciplines and offering hands-on experiences with robotics.

“My hope is that the students leave with a better sense of how broad robotics is and how it can cater to different interests,” says Miner School of Computer & Information Sciences Asst. Prof. Maru Cabrera, who is running RoboXploration alongside postdoctoral research associate Janelle Clark.

Image by Brooke Coupal

Funded by a $50,000 Amazon Robotics grant, RoboXploration held its first one-week session at the end of June for 20 students and will host a second session at the end of July for 20 additional students who come from surrounding towns.

“I was excited about this camp because I love robotics,” says Grace McGarth, who recently finished eighth grade at North Andover Middle School.

At the NERVE Center, the students learned different robotic skills, such as building a robotic finger out of silicone, controlling a robotic gripper through coding and navigating robots via teleoperation, or operating from a distance. Cherry Budha, who tried computer programming for the first time during the camp, was most impressed by the many robots housed at the NERVE Center.

“I had seen robots online before, but never in person, so that was really cool,” says Budha, a recent graduate of Wood Hill Middle School in Andover.

During the camp, the students visited MassRobotics in Boston, where they practiced soldering. The first group also took a tour of Boston Dynamics in Waltham, while the second group will tour Amazon Robotics in North Reading.

Image by Courtesy

“The students have gotten a tour of the NERVE Center, MassRobotics and an industry partner, so they can see the different types of organizations that are working on similar problems,” Clark says. “We’re exposing them to a lot of different aspects of robotics.”

Computer science majors Noah Rothgaber and Katherine Tamayo and biological sciences major Patricia Zihindula are serving as mentors for the middle schoolers during the camp. 

“It feels great to help out the younger kids,” says Rothgaber, a rising senior from Salem, New Hampshire. 

“I wish when I was in middle school, I was able to do a program like this,” adds Tamayo, a rising junior from Lowell. “It’s a good opportunity for them to get introduced to robotics early.”