The Best College Robotics Programs In The Country

The goal of the Johns Hopkins University's Laboratory for Computational Sensing and Robots (a not-for-profit division of the school) is straightforward: to "create knowledge and foster innovation to further the field of robotics science and engineering."

This is accomplished by exposing students to a wide variety of robotics topics. Consider its LIMBS Laboratory, which examines the principles of sensory guidance in animals and sees how they might be applied to robots. Consider its Computational Interaction and Robotics Laboratory, which examines the many hard problems encountered in human-robot interaction and robotic spatial awareness.

Check out this fact sheet on the school's robotics facilities. You can tell they're taking this stuff seriously.

Mining is an incredibly complex pursuit, and robots can step in to do dangerous work to save lives. Someone needs to build them, and the Colorado School of Mines has its Center for Automation, Robotics, and Distributed Intelligence (CARDI) to equip people with the tools to do so.

Because it's a mining-centric school, curriculum runs the gamut from communication protocols to environmental considerations. CARDI students meet once a month over lunch to keep each other apprised of their research — one person will give a presentation on what they're up to, and the meetings frequently feature a guest to speak on topics relevant to the industry.

If you want to check out a cool project to come out of the school, we recommend "Intelligent Geosystems."

Since its founding in 1962, Stanford's Artificial Intelligence Laboratory has been facilitating robotics education for 52 years. Students gather for weekly reading groups to dissect robotics papers and discuss the latest developments in their fields.

Its faculty's list of interests is loaded with fun robo-buzzwords: informatics, logic, machine learning, natural language processing, and so on.

USC's Robotics Research Lab encourages undergrads to get their hands dirty by taking directed research credits from faculty. Graduate students are invited to do research and build things in the university's robotics labs.

A dedicated page exists just to showcase videos of USC robotic creations in action. One of them is a robot for children that blows bubbles!

The projects described on the website for Columbia University's Robotics Group are impressive to say the least. Students have built autonomous vehicles for navigating urban environments, 3-D simulation tools to teach robots how to interact with the real world, and even a system for facilitate aspects of surgery-by-robot.

The program is headed up by Professor Peter Allen, who was named a Presidential Young Investigator by the National Science Foundation.

Often referred to as the "Harvard of the Midwest," WashU offers a masters of engineering in robotics. The program is built around giving students the necessary experience to find professional robotics work upon graduation, and the curriculum is built upon making sense of robotic components like sensors and actuators, then finding new ways to use them to solve problems.

Students enrolled in the program will go hands-on with mobile robotics, robot-human interaction, and brain-computer interfaces.

Georgia Tech's Institute for Robotics and Intelligent Machines is led by Henrik Christensen, a noted roboticist and thinker who recently speculated that children born today will never have to drive a conventional car. He's constantly cited as a source for where robotics is heading in the future, even speculating here as to what Google will do with all its recent robotics acquisitions.

The program aims to give students an understanding of a diversity of robotics topics, such as mechanics, interactions, perceptions, and artificial intelligence and cognition.

The Carnegie Mellon Robotics Institute consists of 76 faculty members, 94 Ph.D. students and 132 master’s students. The university only offers a minor in robotics or a second major in robotics — students have to have already been accepted into another undergraduate major — but despite this, CMU has turned out a number of impressive robotics thinkers and entrepreneurs.

Alumni include Chris Urmson, who heads up Google’s self-driving car program. Boris Sofman, Mark Palatucci, and Hanns Tappeiner are the founders of Anki, the company that builds artificially intelligent car racing sets. Mark Maimone pilots NASA's Curiosity on Mars!

A Carnegie Mellon team led by Professor William “Red” Whittaker won the 2007 DARPA Urban Challenge robot vehicle race, which functions as something of a robot Olympics.

MIT is nearly synonymous with developing cool, cutting-edge technology.

Its Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory has spawned a number of robotic creations, and its long list of notable alumni includes folks like Colin Angle and Helen Greiner, co-founders of iRobot; Marc Raibert, founder of Boston Dynamics; and Matt Mason, who is now director of The Robotics Institute at Carnegie Mellon University.

There's something to be said for a school whose alumni make up the majority of the country's computer science professors.

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