IEEE Robotics & Automation Magazine - September 2019 - 91

EDUCATION

The Role of the Liberal Arts in
Undergraduate Robotics Education
By Matt Zucker

R

obotics falls at the intersec-
tion of engineering, computer
science, math, physics, and
cognitive science. As robots
become ubiquitous in society, they
impact our everyday lives in both more
frequent and more significant ways. In
contrast to siloed approaches that
establish robotics under the sole purview
of a single academic department, fram-
ing undergraduate robotics education
in a liberal arts context is not just an
effec tive way to make connec tions
among disparate areas of inquiry-it is
a necessary step toward making better
and more responsible roboticists.
Given the multidisciplinary nature of
an undergraduate robotics course, it is
tempting to require prerequisite courses
in circuits, programming, or mechanics.
However, permissive requirements admit
a broader range of students, each with
his or her own interests and expertise.
Connections to sciences beyond physics
and math abound: consider biologically
inspired swarm robotics and artificial
muscle actuators or the tools and con-
cepts from psychology that inform
human-robot interaction. Ideally, engi-
neering students taking robotics can
share their foundational knowledge with
nonengineers while benefiting in turn
from other perspectives. In my own
classroom, I have observed how stu-
dents studying disciplines from phys-
ics to linguistics marshal evidence and
frame their understanding of complex
systems in diverse ways, providing the
Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/MRA.2019.2921469
Date of publication: 5 September 2019

class with multiple lenses through which
to view robotics.
Robotics can also make these dispa-
rate fields more accessible. For example,
a student who struggled to interpret
covariance matrices for multivariate
Gaussians in a statistics class may gain
intuition by visualizing the uncertainty
ellipse of a robot localizing itself with an
extended Kalman filter. Considering the
national movement emphasizing appli-
cations-first approaches to engineering
education, it is no surprise that an
increasing number of introductory
classes in circuits and programming are
turning toward robotics to draw stu-
dents in and cement their understand-
ing of science, technology, engineering,
and mathematics (STEM) subjects.
Educators teaching robotics can
uphold the values of self-determination
and freedom of inquiry central to the
liberal arts. Given the breadth of the
discipline, students will naturally spe-
cialize, just as professional roboticists
do. If a mechanically inclined student
focuses on understanding actuators
and controls while a computationally
inclined student devotes more atten-
tion to motion planning, both still
take away valuable lessons. Provided
opportunities to collaborate and com-
municate, each student will profit from
the other's enthusiasm and expertise.
Open-ended assignments and self-
directed projects are great ways to
allow such specialization to flourish,
while in-class presentations develop
communications skills and empower
students to educate peers about topics
that inspire them.

A holistic robotics education should
expose students to the history of tech-
nology. At Swarthmore College, where
the majority of students taking Mobile
Robotics are engineering or computer
science majors, I often start the course
with a timeline of key points in robotics
and artificial intelligence (AI), begin-
ning in 1920 with
playwright Karel
Čapek's coining of
Ideally, engineering
the word robot as
we use it today. In
students taking
tracing the evolu-
robotics can share
tion of the field,
I  highlight the
their foundational
sometimes stri-
knowledge with
dent division be-
tween the con -
nonengineers
nectionist and
while benefiting
symbolic camps
of AI, concluding
in turn from other
with the success-
perspectives.
ful integration of
the once-dueling
approaches in
DeepMind's 2016 AlphaGo system.
For many students, this is the first time
that they grapple with the notion that
STEM topics they may have previously
seen as objective or neutral are, in fact,
immersed in ideological debate and
influenced by trends in both the research
community and society at large. Going
forward, I hope to invite guest lecturers
versed in science and technology stud-
ies to frame robotics in the larger con-
text of technological developments in
the 20th and 21st centuries.
Although most engineering courses
can host conversations about the social

SEPTEMBER 2019

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IEEE ROBOTICS & AUTOMATION MAGAZINE

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