Towards a Unified CPS Education: Lessons Learned from a Cross-Disciplinary Robotics Engineering Program

In 2007, Worcester Polytechnic Institute (WPI) introduced an undergraduate degree program in robotics engineering, first in the United States, with the goal of educating a new cadre of engineering students with multidisciplinary skills to meet the workforce needs of the growing robotics industry. A four-course core curriculum called unified robotics is at the center of the program and provides an effective way of teaching foundations of robotics engineering from traditional disciplines of computer science, electrical engineering and mechanical engineering. In its fifth year, the program has been highly successful in meeting its educational outcomes in terms of quantity and quality of enrolled students, ABET EAC accreditation, placement in engineering workforce and graduate school, and course and project evaluations. In this paper, we present our approach to designing a new cross-disciplinary engineering degree program, share lessons learned from several revisions of the program and discuss the synergy and common traits between cyber-physical systems and robotics education.