Robotics Engineering as an Undergraduate Major

The Mechatronics Education Innovations Webinar Series is back! After a short end of the year holidays/hectic start of a new semester, we are all set for a new season of webinars and looking forward to new presentations on mechatronics and robotics programs, student projects, and more.

We are kicking off the season with a visit to the Worcester Polytechnic Institute. Dr.Michael Gennert will introduce us to their Robotics Engineering undergrad program. Launched in 2007, it was the first program of its kind offered in the United States.

Dr. Gennert will offer a brief synopsis of the program, comparison with other approaches, and a multi-year retrospective on the program's evolution over the last decade. He will discuss the curriculum of this highly successful program, its guiding philosophy, and evolution. Dr. Gennert will share the experiences from building the program, lessons learned, and recommendations for future actions to further robotics education.

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Michael A. Gennert is Professor of Robotics Engineering, CS, and ECE at Worcester Polytechnic Institute, where he leads the WPI Humanoid Robotics Laboratory and was Founding Director of the Robotics Engineering Program. He has worked at the University of Massachusetts Medical Center, the University of California Riverside, PAR Technology Corporation, and General Electric. He received the S.B. in CS, S.B. in EE, and S.M. in EECS in 1980 and the Sc.D. in EECS in 1987 from MIT.  Dr. Gennert's research interests include robotics, computer vision, and image processing, with ongoing projects in humanoid robotics, robot navigation and guidance, biomedical image processing, and stereo and motion vision.  He led WPI teams in the DARPA Robotics Challenge and NASA Space Robotics Challenge and is author or co-author of over 100 papers.  His research has been supported by DARPA, NASA, NIH, NSF, and industry. He is a member of Sigma Xi, and a senior member of IEEE and ACM.