Preparing to Design Robots for Social Contexts
Clinton J. Andrews · IEEE Technology and Society Magazine · 2022
Educational programs in robotics have focused mostly on developing science, technology, engineering, and math skills, with recent extensions into the arts[1]. This focus has been entirely appropriate, until recently. Successful roboticists have been generalists with a specialty[2]whose careers involve both thinking and doing. Thinking (“investigative”) and doing (“realistic”) are personality traits that, when strongly correlated, predict success in computer science, engineering, and, by interpolation, robotics[3]. Industry voices confirm that roboticists need skills in systems thinking, a programming mindset, active learning, mathematics, science or other applied mathematics, judgment and decision making, good cross-disciplinary communication, technology design, complex problem solving, and persistence[4]. This list is adequate for many applications of robotic autonomous systems (“robots”).