Prof. Michael A. Gennert is Director of the Robotics Engineering Program and Associate Professor of Computer Science and Electrical & Computer Engineering at Worcester Polytechnic Institute (WPI) in Worcester, Massachusetts, the first university in the country to offer robotics as an undergraduate course and the first to recently receive accreditation.  In addition, WPI is the only university in the nation with bachelor’s, master’s, and doctoral programs in this burgeoning field.

Gennert received the S.B. in Computer Science, S.B. in Electrical Engineering, and S.M. in Electrical Engineering in 1980, and the Sc.D. in Electrical Engineering in 1987 from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Dr. Gennert’s interests include Computer Vision, Image Processing, Scientific Databases, and Programming Languages, with ongoing projects in biomedical image processing, robotics, and stereo and motion vision. He is author or co-author of over 100 papers. He is a member of IEEE, ACM, Sigma Xi, NDIA Robotics Division, and the Massachusetts Technology Leadership Council Robotics Cluster.

Q. What was it that attracted you to the field of robotics?

A. I used to build “robots” out of Lego when I was 8 or 9 years old.  Of course, that was way before Lego MindStorms, so my robots didn’t do anything!  Hadn’t done much with robots afterwards — except for supervising the occasional student project — until 8 years ago when I saw a Roomba in action.  Now there was a robot that did something.  Well, if robots had advanced to that point that quickly, they were sure to keep on advancing.  What would they do in 10, 20, or 30 years?  I didn’t know, but I wanted to educate the people who would make it happen.  So we started the Robotics Engineering program at WPI.

Q. What’s your favorite part about teaching robotics?

A. What I like most about teaching robotics is seeing the change in undergraduates from when they get to college to when they graduate.  We get very bright students in the door, but they aren’t yet ready for prime time — you wouldn’t hire them for company-critical work.  Yet, when they graduate 4 years later, they have learned so much and gained so much experience and maturity that you could start a company with them and they’d do very well.  The next best part is working with some incredibly talented and caring faculty and staff.  They are what makes the Robotics Engineering program a success.

Q. What do you find gets your students most excited about robotics?

A. Our in-class and capstone projects really turn students on.  They get to apply what they learned to challenging problems that range from fanciful to practical – farming, changing lightbulbs, washing windows, bomb disposal, insect infestation detection — and accomplish work that is way beyond what one could reasonably expect, but they do it anyway.

Q. What’s one thing about you that hardly anyone knows?

A. I wrote a song entitled “Made Me a Robot” and have performed it at the WPI CS CoffeeHouse.  Lyrics are at http://web.cs.wpi.edu/~michaelg/play/MadeMeARobot.pdf.

Q. If you could have a dinner party and invite three guests (from past or present), who would they be?

A. Richard P. Feynman, William Faulkner, and George Carlin.  Three notorious rule-breakers who help us understand our world and ourselves.

Q. What kinds of robots are your students currently working on and what do you think is the “next frontier” for robotics?

A. My students and I are working on several projects.  One is to develop a robot to climb trees to inspect for insect infestations.  That is the immediate motivating problem that we can use to develop a range of technologies for robots in trees.  Beyond that, one can imagine robots that monitor the environment, such as bird nests and endangered species, prune trees, harvest fruit, and so on.  Another project with Prof. Bill Michalson and our students has us working on a NASA SBIR award with Autonomous Explorations, Inc. to improve the accuracy of robot navigation that would be needed to explore the Moon or Mars.  And a third project has our students working with Prof. Christopher Kitts and his students at Santa Clara University to develop a fleet of robotic kayaks to conduct research on multi-vessel coordination.  Why kayaks?  Because they are easy to work with, reliable, and inexpensive!

The next frontier will have robots working more closely with people. As robots march out of their labs and into our homes, they will start to become our companions. There are many aspects to that, including improved Human-Robot Interaction, novel ways to instruct and teach robots, and improved sensing so that robots can better hear, see and especially feel their surroundings. Just as the current generation of students has grown up as digital natives, taking for granted that they are immersed in computing and communications environments, I fully expect future generations to grow up as “robot natives”.