Jobs Are Plentiful in the Region's Growing Robotics Industry
01/01/2024
By Katharine Webster
Why minor in robotics?
Mike Fisher ’23, a bachelor’s-to-master’s student in computer engineering who minored in robotics as an undergraduate and is taking advanced robotics classes as a graduate student, has two answers.
“Robots are cool,” he says. “I’d like to work in industry in robotics when I graduate.”
The Robotics Teaching Lab in Dandeneau Hall on North Campus shows off the cool factor: A “Duckie bot,” which students learn how to build and program in the Fundamentals of Robotics class, drives around a looping track with rubber duckies riding on top. Modified “turtle bots” that feature a round, Roomba-style base with moveable arms that end in “grippers” for picking up objects. There is even a cat toy that will follow a black line on white poster board.
Cooler still: Around the corner in Southwick Hall, a one-time basketball court has just been renovated to house the Lowell Advanced Robotics Initiative (LARI) Lab, a 3,700-square-foot facility with high ceilings where students and faculty can fly drones or train robots to operate kitchen appliances.
As to the second reason Fisher cites, jobs for UML graduates with specialized training in the field are bountiful in Massachusetts, where some 345 robotics companies are working on everything from medical robots to autonomous vehicles, says Electrical and Computer Engineering Asst. Prof. Paul Robinette, one of three faculty co-directors for the minor. Graduates have gone to work at NASA and companies including Segway, iRobot, MediTech, Boston Dynamics, BAE Systems and MITRE Corp., as well as numerous startups.
“Robotics is a rapidly growing field, and we see it continuing to grow rapidly for the foreseeable future,” Robinette says. “This minor helps students prepare for jobs—and for research positions, if they want to go on to graduate school.”
The interdisciplinary minor, launched in 2010 by Prof. Holly Yanco, chair of the Miner School of Computer and Information Sciences, is open to engineering students in any major as well as computer science majors. Some business students have completed it, too, Robinette says.
Most students enroll as juniors because they need to complete several prerequisites before taking Fundamentals of Robotics. Some students do co-ops or internships in robotics before they graduate, Robinette says, and they have multiple opportunities to do paid research with faculty.
Indeed, Fisher is doing experiments on human trust in robots in Robinette’s lab, using a simulation that resembles a video game. Danielle Le ’23, a bachelor’s-to-master’s student in electrical engineering who is focusing her graduate studies on artificial intelligence and machine learning, worked in Robinette’s lab as an undergraduate and is now a research assistant at the Raytheon UMass Lowell Research Institute.
Jacob Breen, a junior honors student majoring in computer science, is working on Yanco’s team in the New England Robotics Validation and Experimentation (NERVE) Center at the UML Innovation Hub in downtown Lowell. The NERVE Center, the only robotics testing facility in the Northeast, boasts 10,000 square feet of test surfaces, obstacle courses and equipment used for evaluating robots’ capabilities and human-robot interactions. Breen is currently working on a soft gripper, meant to simulate a hand.
“I do a little bit of engineering and a little bit of computer science programming to create a robot that can do what we want it to do,” Breen says. “I’ve also worked on virtual robot simulation and data analysis.”
Last summer, Yanco recommended Breen for a paid work-study program at the University of Oldenburg in Germany, where he ran a study on using ChatGPT to communicate with Ameca, an advanced humanoid robot. It was a fantastic experience, he says.
Breen is also president of the UML Robotics Club, which meets in the teaching lab and builds its own robots, including the X-bot, an X-shaped machine on multidirectional wheels that zooms around the floor via remote control. Club members take the X-bot into local elementary and middle schools to get kids excited about robotics. The club also hosts a FIRST Robotics competition for high school students and a “Build a Robot” event for the campus.
Eight faculty in the Francis College of Engineering and the Kennedy College of Sciences do research in robotics, including the minor’s other co-directors: Computer Science Asst. Prof. Maru Cabrera, who uses AI and machine learning to improve assistance robots for people who are disabled or aging in place, and Mechanical Engineering Asst. Prof. Kshitij Jerath, who researches the use of drone swarms for mapping remote areas and aiding in disaster response and search and rescue operations.
Jerath says he is always looking for more undergraduates to work in his lab, where they can figure out if they enjoy robotics.
“Robotics is the future,” he says. “And it’s a lot of fun.”