REU Site: Robotics and Autonomous Systems

University Of Southern California, Los Angeles CA

Investigators

Abstract

This Research Experiences for Undergraduates (REU) award will provide funding to support American undergraduate students to have an internship at the University of Southern California. Each student will be paired with a professor and work in their lab for a summer. The participating faculty mentors span the spectrum of cutting-edge research topics in robotics and are well established leaders or rising stars in their field. The students will gain research experience in approaching some of the most challenging modern robotics problems. This will help train more students to get engaged in the robotics field, thus ultimately advancing national prosperity due to the prevalence of robotics in daily life. The proposed REU will train eight undergraduates for 10 weeks each year, with the goal of attracting students to robotics who might otherwise have relatively less exposure or opportunity from their home institution. The REU will specifically train students in research methodology by engaging them in authentic research projects. The research projects cover multiple areas of robotics and autonomous systems, including socially assistive robotics, aerial robotics, safety-critical robotics, robot learning, and robot manipulation. The faculty will design projects to make them in scope for a summer, and to enable the students to achieve greater independence as the program progresses. To evaluate the quality of the REU and its effectiveness, the REU will keep in touch and track each student’s progress before, during, and after the REU. This site is supported by the Department of Defense in partnership with the NSF REU program. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.