Grant: Collaborative Research and Training Experience

Robotics offers extraordinary opportunities to revolutionize the way people live and work. Mobile robots with the ability to navigate and share spaces with humans offer expanded opportunities, from autonomous assessment of pedestrian pathways, coordinated robot services to facilitate municipal logistics, and personalized social robots for physical and cognitive assistance at home. Presently, most robot systems are keptisolated from people for safety reasons, limiting both the robot and human worker's abilities to work efficiently together. The design of robots that interact collaboratively with humans raises new technical, social, and ethicalchallenges that current training opportunities are not designed to address. ADVENTOR: Advanced Engineeringand Training in Next-Generation Mobile Robotics for Human Spaces establishes a unique training program that focuses specifically on mobile robots that interact or work closely with people in unstructured or human-built environments. Our program combines technical training with integrated socio-ethical design thinking, human-centred approaches, professional skills, and hands-on experiences to solve complex challenges. Developed by an interdisciplinary research team of experts in mobile robotics, social robotics, human-robot interaction, psychology, robot ethics, and more, the ADVENTOR program includes new specialized course modules that bridge disciplinary boundaries and experiential training experiences in the form of internships, research exchanges, and site visits. Our program offers trainees a number of exciting mobility opportunities from conducting research in other team member's lab to access specialized equipment togaining practical experience with our non-academic collaborators. There exists a significant need within multiple Canadian sectors for trainees with in-depth interdisciplinary training in robotics, and this demand has only grown more rapidly with the recent pandemic. With the next generation of trainees prepared for this frontier of robotics research, we can begin to move robots from their limited utility in fixed settings to the field,allowing robots to be anywhere and everywhere they are needed.