Robotics

Robotics

Welcome

The Colorado School of Mines offers both graduate and undergraduate opportunities to study robotics. For undergraduate students there are relevant courses and specializations in several departments across campus. For example, students can choose to focus on robotics and intelligent systems, robotics and automation, and/or robotics and design. Follow the undergraduate program link for more information.

The Mines Robotics graduate program is an interdisciplinary program that unites faculty, coursework, and research opportunities from the Departments of Computer Science, Electrical Engineering, Mechanical Engineering, and the Division of Engineering, Design, and Society, creating an educational experience that reflects the inherently interdisciplinary and systems-oriented nature of the field of robotics. The program features a core curriculum focused on four robotics focus areas, while also giving students flexibility to choose electives to develop their depth of expertise. Graduates have the cutting-edge skills needed for robotics careers in either research or industry.

professor with robot

Tom Williams wins NSF CAREER Award to improve robotic communication skills.

What if robots had working memory? Williams aims to find out.

Tom Williams, assistant professor of computer science at Mines, has received a National Science Foundation CAREER Award for work aimed at improving the ability of robots to communicate in human-like ways — inspired by how the actual human mind processes information.

Cognitive psychology is the field of scientific study that explores the operation of human mental processes related to perceiving, thinking, language, memory and more.

Williams will receive $549,999 over five years for his project, “Cognitively-Informed Memory Models for Language-Capable Robots,” which will apply lessons from cognitive psychology in hopes of developing working memory processes in robots.

“Working memory refers to the small amount of information that humans are able to keep on hand and manipulate in the context of cognitive processing,” Williams said.

Here, he answers a few questions about his research and why the constrained size of working memory is actually a good thing, for humans and potentially robots. More

Robotics Blog

Official Hub for the
Robotics Program at Mines

(Dataquest Magazine, August, 2021)

“Long-run perspectives for robotics remain excellent.”