Proposed Robotics Curriculum, Portland State University

This is only the first draft. The curriculum in Robotics will be coordinated between the departments of ECE, CS, and ME.
The program should be:
  1. Modern
  2. Practical
  3. Hands-on
  4. Product and Market-Oriented
  5. Emphasis on art, industrial design and software, rather than mechanics and theory.


Below, I am not listing all courses, only courses that will be affected by new robotics curriculum. Also, rather than allowing students to have a total freedom in social science and liberal art classes, we should permit to take only those select classes that are relevant to widely understood robotics. It will still give a lot of freedom to select art, psychology, biology and business classes. However, classes in history, geography, general studies, physics, chemistry, pre-med or physical education will be removed, to make a more streamlined curriculum.

Every student graduating from this program should be able to design by himself a complete robot, similar to those that are built for Hollywood and entertainment industry. It should include physical design, kinematics, dynamics, sensors and actuators selection, interfacing and hardware design, various software programs and embedded controllers. Students should be also practically familiar with industrial digital control, automated manufacturing, industrial robots and all kinds of robot applications. They will be able to work not only in the fast developing home robotics market but also in multimedia, Internet and electronic commerce, game programming businesses, as well as in traditional computer engineering and computer science industries.

This program should appeal to a new category of students who have truly creative and innovative spirit. Also students with artistic and managerial talents. Hacker types. Now we are often losing such students (vide Martin Helliwell whose papers were cited by many authors and who now makes more money in Silicon Valey's software industry than three full PSU ECE professors, but who was never able to pass Prof. Morris early class).

The laboratory with excellent tools and many ongoing projects that are visible and demonstrable should be a focal point of the new program.

There are no programs like this except for MIT Media Labs and University of Southern California (USC).

The classes should be strongly coordinated towards achieving these goals, rather than letting them down to teach whoever whatever teaches their subjects now. All classes should have heavy design and software components, more heavy than CpE or CS. This program should become known for the practical skills of its alumni.

We will follow the new philosophy of teaching engineers that originates from MIT, CMU and USC: tinkering and building. Design and creativity. We should perhaps limit the number of students in the program and allow only high quality students to graduate. The quality will be however measured not by GPA grades only, but by the final thesis-project whose quality will be strictly enforced and evaluated by at least three faculty members. The defense will be public, engineers from industry will be invited and the thesis will have to be practically demonstrated as a working program and operating robot or hardware. The thesis without practical component will be not allowed. These "theses" will be not M.S. kind of theses, rather like large projects with practical results.

The Harvey Mudd clinique could be an excellent example of such education. I am sure that James McNames can give us also other good ideas from CalPoly and Stanford.

The goal would be to teach students who will, through their start-up companies, make Portland metropolitan area the "another Hollywood". Now entertainment technology and multimedia technology and robotics are developed mostly in Southern California, thus USC curriculum should be a model.

Zielinska and Zielinski are roboticists from Poland (Warsaw University of Technology) who work now in Singapure. They can be contracted on short term basis to develop the curriculum; they developed robotics curricula in Warsaw (two Departments) and in Singapure.

Strong collaboration with OMSI should be developed, next with OGI, OHSU and OSU, as well as with OIT. We should use resources of local film and entertainment industry and be known by them as a place to look for help.

It should be also considered that the program will be four and half rather than four years, and each student to graduate should demonstrate his/her practical design and software skills by a one-year-long project with thesis report, WEB page and audiovisual oral presentation. Ability to design should be strongly enforced and students without this ability will be not able to graduate.
Class Professor
 Department
NEW
Design and Workshop		 Lentz Tears of Joy Theatre
SELECT:
Sculpture		 ?? Art
Robot Kinematics and Dynamics ?? ?? MIE 1062F, ROBOT KINEMATICS AND DYNAMICS, Dr. M.R. Emami, Univ of Toronto.
SELECT:
Multimedia Production		 ?? ??
SELECT:
Audio Engineering		 ?? OMSI
EE221
Classical Control		 Tymerski ECE
EE271
Digital Systems with robotics project 		Perkowski ECE
NEW
Control Systems Sensors and Actuators		 Tymerski ECE

Design of Automatic Control Systems		 Tymerski ECE
NEW
Introductory MIT Lego Robotics Course 		Chambless ECE and SysSc USC course of Maja Mataric Ohio State Dartmouth course on Lego
Industrial Robotics Chien Wern Intro to Robotics John Hopkins ME
Robots in industrial manufacturing Chien Wern, Turcic? ME
Robot Programming Zielinski ME
NEW. Mobile Robots Zielinska ME CS649: Autonomous Mobile Robotics. University of Manchester, U.K.
NEW Design of Consumer Electronics ?? ?
Neural Networks I and II Lendaris SysSc
Game Theory Zwick SysSc
Linear Systems I and II Fu Li, Andy Fraser ECE
Hollywood Technologies Some? ?
Modern Cinema Technologies Some? ?
Data Mining McNames ECE
Microprocessors and Interfacing Hall ECE
Computer Architecture Hall ECE
Advanced Computer Architecture and Parallel Processing Song ECE
Advanced Robot Mechanics Zielinska ME
Advanced Internet Communication Binkley ME
Evolutionary Computation I and II Greenwood ECE
PROLOG Antoy CS
Artificial Intelligence Massey CS
Logic in Computer Science and Robotics Hein CS
Parallel Processing Csanky CS
Assembly Level Programming ? CS
Agent Programming ? CS
Computer Graphics ? CS
Game Programming ? CS
VHDL and FPGA Perkowski ECE
ECE 478, ECE 479, Intelligent Robotics I and II Perkowski ECE
Artificial Life Zwick SysSc
Evolvable Hardware Buller, DeGaris ATR
Advanced Programming Techniques in Visual C++ Mishchenko ECE
Real Time Operating Systems ? CS
Enterpreneurship and Patenting ? from industry, Zmation?
Robots in Medicine and Rehabilitation Robotics ? OHSU
Adaptive Systems ECE Adaptive Systems John Hopkins
Wireless Communications Fu Li ECE
Dynamical Systems and Control Laboratory Fu Li ECE Dynamical Systems John Hopkins
Computer Vision Fu Li ECE Vision, John Hopkins
System Administration Janaka Jayawardeena ECE
January 18, 2001