CPATH CB: Building Community via Robotics Innovations Competition and Conference

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This CPATH CB project builds an intercollegiate and multi-disciplinary community of faculty promoting the education of entrepreneurially-oriented robotics engineering students through engagement in a Robotics Innovations Competition and Conference.This project will involve several community-building phases featuring workshops that will architect the competition, prepare the resource materials, provide a forum for participating university faculty and students and conclude with the first regional competition and conference. The Robotics Innovations Competition and Conference will challenge students to design and build robots to perform useful and novel tasks through a university-level competition. Entrants will be judged primarily on the extent to which they meet existing needs or create new markets, and secondarily with respect to design and analysis, implementation skill, and business plans. While robotics competitions exist at the K12 and university levels, these are notably based on games with a fixed set of rules. The competition planned in this project is different in that it emphasizes the engineering of solutions to open-ended real-world problems and invites creativity by an open competition based on the intellectual and commercial and/or humane aspects of the solutions. Students from all CISE disciplines would participate in the competition as well as in the preparatory workshops and concluding conference.The identification of new things for robots to do as the next logical step in the development of robotics requires actions to accelerate the process by inspiring more students to think about new applications. The successful robotics innovation and invention team will likely comprise a multidisciplinary group of engineering and computer scientists spanning all CISE disciplines. Therefore, the project team plans to build a community focused on the fusion of CISE disciplines in the context of a single topic, robotics. The proposed suite of activities planned for this project will serve as a testing ground and a springboard for the dissemination. The ultimate goals include not just a fundamental change in the packaging and delivery of multidisciplinary education centered on robotics, but also the creation of a pool of students with a demonstrably intense interest in a vocation that meets important national and economic needs.