BU to Open New Robotics Lab to Foster More Innovators – Boston University

Its a playroom for Boston University students to operate robots on the groundand in the air. Its a brain space to research robots that think. Its a miniaturized city for road testing mini self-driving vehicles. Its an area to work on lifesaving, flexible medical robots that dont require motors or rigid parts.

BU undergraduates and masters students, heretofore largely shut out of the Universitys tight robotics laboratory space, will now be able to explore the robotics world at a new College of Engineering lab. The $8.8 million, 2,000-square-foot Robotics and Autonomous Systems Teaching and Innovation Center (RASTIC), to be sited in the former CVS building at 730 Commonwealth Ave., will open in summer 2023.

It will be funded 50-50 by the University and the Massachusetts Technology Collaborative (MassTech), a public agency supporting the states tech sector. Mike Kennealy, Massachusetts secretary of housing and economic development, announced the grant at a news conference May 4 at the BU Photonics Center, flanked by University and state leaders, including Robert A. Brown, president of BU, and Kenneth Lutchen, dean of ENG.

The new tools were investing in today, Kennealy said, will allow students to design and launch their own R&D projects, and for companies in the region, it will create a neutral space for research thats focused on robotics and autonomous solutions, and work with BU students and faculty to design, prototype, and test new devices. He said the lab will also host kindergarten-through-12th grade students in a tech scholars program.

This is really, really good work, and really important work, he said. This is a fabulous example of that work, and it really is critical to the future of our state in a lot of ways.We have to continue to be among the most innovative places in the world.

Brown called the lab a perfect illustration of what happens when this kind of force of imaginative leadership in academia and industry meet together with a state that has got the vision and foresight to support the kind of innovation that were doing. He quipped that Kennealy, who once worked in private equity, knows something about placing bets, which hes now doing today.

MassTech has awarded about 10 such grants among a field of 26 applicants, said Pat Larkin, director of MassTechs grant-making Innovation Institute. RASTIC clearly rose to the top, he said, andwe felt, scored on many of the metrics that are important to us.

With RASTIC, BU will more than quadruple its masters degree students in robotics, Larkin said, boosting Massachusetts competitiveness with rivals from Silicon Valley to China: We have a real appetite to address the talent challenges that exist in this state that are critical to the future of our tech and innovation economy.The number-one constraint in every emerging sector that we work with in Massachusetts is the human capital to build on the asset that exists.

The students that come out of BU RASTIC we anticipate being the actual innovators of the future, he said. They are going to gain an experience there thats going to inspire new ideas, new innovations, new opportunities for start-ups and new business formation in the state.

The commonwealth has a robust, globally significant robotics sector, Larkin added. And to build capabilities both on the technology side and on the talent side really feeds the flywheel in Massachusetts for robotics.

He said the expectation is that the team at BU will help take the robotics cluster in Massachusetts to the very next level.

Ioannis Paschalidis, an ENG Distinguished Professor of Engineering and of computing and data sciences, drafted the RASTIC proposal that won the grant with Sean Andersson, an ENG professor of mechanical and systems engineering. (Paschalidis directs BUs Center for Information and Systems Engineering, the organizational home of RASTIC.) A lot of robotics research takes place in EPIC, BUs Engineering Product Innovation Center, he says. But we have undergraduate students in electrical engineering and mechanical engineering, [and] there is no capacity there for them or for masters students.

In particular, Paschalidis says, ENGs masters program in robotics and autonomous systems, which has an experiential component, gets roughly 300 applications a year, but can select only about 20. We dont have the capacity to support many of these projects, he says. We need a place where the students can go in, can engage, industry can come in and be affiliated sponsors of specific projects that students at the masters and at the undergraduate level can do.

A student in that program, Nash Elder (ENG23), agrees. He works with folding robots inspired by origami, and having the means to fabricate hardware, access software backed by computing power, and collaborate with other students is an empowering resource, he said.I could see the space really as a central hub for the roboticists of BU.

BU will hire a professor to direct RASTIC, which will also have space for BU researchers with robotics grants to translate their ideas into practical applications. Among the areas researchers and students will test at the new lab, Paschalidis says, are these:

RASTIC builds on a long-standing collaboration between BU and the commonwealth, Larkin said, including the construction in Holyoke, with several other partners, of the Massachusetts Green High Performance Computing Center.

Boston University has been a good partner to the state over many years, he said. The key personnel at BUthey understand the mission of the state. These investments are about growing the economy.Our university infrastructure really represents our comparative advantage as an economy globally.

We dont grow corn. We dont have oil. We have people.

Continue reading here:

BU to Open New Robotics Lab to Foster More Innovators - Boston University