The Michigan Robotics Undergraduate Program owes a tremendous debt of gratitude to many people across our Robotics Institute and Robotics Department, the University of Michigan, the College of Engineering, the State of Michigan, and the greater national and global robotics community. Creating a first-of-a-kind robotics program is an incredibly bold and daring undertaking that would not be possible without the support, contributions, empathy, and insights from all corners of our amazing university (Go Blue!). While it would be impossible to recognize everyone who played important roles in realizing the Robotics Major, we would like to acknowledge some individuals who were especially critical to the formation of the program. We must first thank Dean Alec Gallimore and the College of Engineering for their visionary leadership throughout our evolution. Under the guidance and stewardship of Dean Gallimore, the Robotics Institute was able to grow, thrive, and prove it has the right stuff to become a viable academic department and undergraduate program. None of this would be possible without your confidence in us and willingness to innovate for the Common Good. The Robotics Institute owes its origins to Dawn Tilbury - the founding Director of the Robotics Institute (in 2014 under Dean David Munson) and now the inaugural Chair of the Robotics Department - and her foresight to envision what has become the home of Michigan Robotics - the Ford Motor Company Robotics Building. Nadine Sarter, Associate Dean Michael Wellman, and the Robotics Future Committee did tremendous work between 2018-20 to explore the potential and opportunities for Michigan to establish a department and undergraduate program in robotics. Their work identified the path for Michigan to earn distinguished leadership in robotics.

CMU's Autonomous Exploration Research Team has developed a suite of robotic systems and planners enabling robots to explore more quickly, probe the darkest corners of unknown environments, and create more accurate and detailed maps -- all without human help. A research group in Carnegie Mellon University's Robotics Institute is creating the next generation of explorers -- robots. The Autonomous Exploration Research Team has developed a suite of robotic systems and planners enabling robots to explore more quickly, probe the darkest corners of unknown environments, and create more accurate and detailed maps. The systems allow robots to do all this autonomously, finding their way and creating a map without human intervention. "You can set it in any environment, like a department store or a residential building after a disaster, and off it goes," said Ji Zhang, a systems scientist in the Robotics Institute.

This paper presents the ARCAD simulator for the rapid development of Unmanned Aerial Systems (UAS), including underactuated and fully-actuated multirotors, fixed-wing aircraft, and Vertical Take-Off and Landing (VTOL) hybrid vehicles. The simulator is designed to accelerate these aircraft's modeling and control design. It provides various analyses of the design and operation, such as wrench-set computation, controller response, and flight optimization. In addition to simulating free flight, it can simulate the physical interaction of the aircraft with its environment. The simulator is written in MATLAB to allow rapid prototyping and is capable of generating graphical visualization of the aircraft and the environment in addition to generating the desired plots. It has been used to develop several real-world multirotor and VTOL applications. The source code is available at https://github.com/keipour/aircraft-simulator-matlab.

Over the last several years use cases for robotics based solutions have diversified from factory floors to domestic applications. In parallel, Deep Learning approaches are replacing traditional techniques in Computer Vision, Natural Language Processing, Speech processing etc. and are delivering robust results. Our goal is to survey a number of research internship projects in the broad area of "Deep Learning as applied to Robotics" and present a concise view for the benefit of aspiring student interns. In this paper, we survey the research work done by Robotic Institute Summer Scholars (RISS), CMU. We particularly focus on papers that use deep learning to solve core robotic problems and also robotic solutions. We trust this would be useful particularly for internship aspirants for the Robotics Institute, CMU.

"The people who have skills, who have training, they can get a job," says Lionel P. Robert Jr., a professor at the University of Michigan Robotics Institute. "The people at the low end--when those jobs go away, they just have less options to find another job." As everyone knows, the supply chain is under tremendous pressure with a boom in consumer spending. E-commerce exploded as the pandemic lockdowns set in, and it continues to grow rapidly (up 14.2% from 2020 to 2021). Demand is accelerating the deployment of already advanced robots, and nowhere are the prospects for automation stronger than in two particular sectors: warehousing and trucking.

The Association for Computing Machinery has named Anupam Gupta and Matthew T. Mason 2021 ACM fellows. The ACM recognized Gupta, a professor in the Computer Science Department, for his contributions to approximation algorithms, online algorithms, stochastic algorithms and metric embeddings. Mason, a professor emeritus in the Robotics Institute, was honored for his contributions to robotic manipulation and manipulation path planning. Gupta and Mason were among 70 fellows recognized in 2021. "Computing professionals have brought about leapfrog advances in how we live, work and play," said ACM President Gabriele Kotsis. "New technologies are the result of skillfully combining the individual contributions of numerous men and women, often building upon diverse contributions that have emerged over decades.

Recently, I had the pleasure of visiting one of the most innovative AI companies in Pittsburgh. Gather AI, an autonomous inventory management AI company, which is revolutionizing the warehousing industry as the title mentions "one drone at a time." Gather AI's founding team is made up of three graduates from Carnegie Mellon University's Robotics Institute, which includes co-founder and chief robotics officer Sankalp Arora, co-founder, and chief technology officer Daniel Maturana, and co-founder and chief security officer, Geetesh Dubey. Gather AI uses state of the art robotics, classic AI methods, and a deep learning engine to enable autonomous inventory monitoring and management, which uses a fleet of drones. Each drone is fully autonomous and paired to a tablet device, which provides inventory data.

They discuss introspection, adaptation, and evolvement in robotics. Michael speaks about topics in state estimation and distributed perception, and other challenges in control, perception, and cognition for both single and multi-robot systems. Nathan Michael is an Associate Research Professor and the Director of the Resilient Intelligent Systems Lab at the Robotics Institute within Carnegie Mellon University (CMU). Professor Michael's research seeks to enable the development of self-sufficient robots and teams of robots that can respond to disasters; robots which can perform the tasks of first responders in order to reduce the number of people placed in harm's way. His research employs the principles of resilient intelligence and persistent knowledge to enable robots to innovate to solve complex problems, to overcome unanticipated challenges and to learn from their experiences.

What do you picture when you think of a robot? That's the first question asked by "The Robot Doctor" -- a new series created by Carnegie Mellon University educators, RobotWits, the Pennsylvania Rural Robotics Initiative and WQED. Airing on PBS stations across Pennsylvania, the eight-episode program is geared toward high school students who may lack access to a computer during school closures, and who live in underresourced areas with limited STEM opportunities. "We're going to explore how robots solve the problems that allow them to be useful in the world. We'll do this with nothing more than the math concepts you may already know: geometry, trigonometry, basic algebra and a few concepts from physics," Jonathan Butzke says in the first episode. Butzke, an alumnus of CMU's Robotics Institute, hosts the show and is lead robotics researcher for RobotWits.

It takes years of work to become a cinematographer. Researchers at Carnegie Mellon University are developing a system for aerial cinematography that learns from human visual preferences in order to enable drones to make artsy filmmaking choices while autonomously filming scenes. The system does not require GPS tags to localize targets or prior maps of an environment. Drones have been a boon to filmmakers, significantly lowering costs for aerial shots, which previously required chartering manned helicopters or airplanes. But the ease of access also comes with a downside.