A Summer Research Experience in Robotics

Abstract

The Robotics Program at Oregon State University has beenrunning an NSF-funded summer Research Experiences forUndergraduates (REU) site since 2014. Over twenty studentsper year (on average) have participated in the site, spendingten weeks embedded in the OSU Robotics Program. Our mainfocus with this REU Site is to give the participants a com-plete research experience, from problem definition to the fi-nal presentation of results, "in miniature". Our secondary ed-ucational objectives are: 1) Teach basic non-technical skillsneeded for graduate work, such as time management and lit-erature review, 2) Provide details on how to apply to gradu-ate school and for funding, 3) Clarify what we look for in agraduate student, and 4) Detail what to expect from the grad-uate student experience. In this paper, we describe the over-all structure of the participants’ summer experience, outlinesome of the training materials that we use, describe the moti-vations for our approach, and discuss the lessons that we havelearned after running the program for a number of years.