The NSF Industry/University Cooperative Research Center (I/UCRC) on Robots and Sensors for Human Well-Being (ROSE-HUB) Phase II will play a leadership role in nurturing and accelerating the deployment of robotics and intelligent sensor technologies in a wide range of application domains key to the national economy, e.g., transportation, energy, logistics, manufacturing, and infrastructure and the well-being of the society, e.g., in healthcare. The ROSE-HUB center will facilitate center university researchers to work with partners from industry, government, other universities, and non-profit organizations to seek solutions to critical real-world challenges.
The research foci of Worcester Polytechnic Institute (WPI) ROSE-HUB projects strive to make fundamental advances both in key technology components, such as algorithms, sensors, and robots, and in integrative systems. The objectives are to advance mobility, manipulation, robot learning, human-machine interaction, and multi-agent coordination capabilities in general and in the context of relevant applications by collaborating with industrial partners. Methodologies will be developed to balance real-time operation and computational cost or energy while providing high-level semantic information of task environments through integrating perception, planning, and learning. Novel robot and sensor systems will also be developed, especially soft robots, sensors, and assistive devices.
Center research will focus on applications including physical/mental health, robots and sensor systems to assist humans, innovative robot designs for monitoring and data collection, precision agriculture, digitization of construction processes, intelligent transportation systems, etc. Research will impact: a) industrial members by inserting research into product pipelines, b) researchers by exploring new ideas and application domains, c) students by providing hands-on experience and future employment potential, and d) academic curricula. Additionally, annual technology days will attract middle school students from underrepresented groups to engineering, and outreach programs to local K-16 institutions will encourage pursuit of engineering education.
The project will create hardware and software and collect experimental data from fixed and mobile robots, Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs), and sensors. A database for data management and dissemination will be established. The software components include: (i) system framework software (e.g., low-level software that operates electro-mechanical systems, i.e., robots, UAVs, etc.), (ii) software for planning, control, sensing, and learning algorithms, (iii) software for demonstration testbeds and prototypes. The data retention period is five years after the conclusion of the award. The data will be released as it becomes available to the http://rosehubiucrc.github.io site.
This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.
