IEEE Robotics & Automation Magazine - June 2023 - 6

PR ES I D E N T ' S M E S S AG E
The Education of a Roboticist
By Frank Park
It was last year in Philadelphia,
during a breakfast
meeting with Kevin Lynch
and our publisher David
Tranah, that the idea of a
second edition of our Modern
Robotics textbook was
floated by David. Memories
of the agony of completing
the first edition by now
having receded, and not yet
ful ly grasping what we
might be getting ourselves
into, Kevin and I actually
began going through the list
of chapters, musing about what chapters
could remain as is, what chapters
needed update, and what new chapters
might be added.
When we started this book project
the time that
the classical
My reason for bringing up
Roger Ware
Brockett, a seminal
figure in robotics
and mathematical
systems theory,
passed away on
19 March 2023.
this memory is that for those
of us whose job involves
some balance between
research and educating the
next generation of roboticists,
it seems to me that we
do not nearly think enough
about what we teach or how
we teach it. To be fair, in a
field as fast moving as ours,
just keeping up can consume
so much time and effort that
it is easy to relegate teaching
to an afterthought. Even
over ten years ago, I think both of us
believed at
material on grasping-of contact models,
force closure conditions, and the
computation of optimal grasps-would
always remain an important and relevant
part of any serious roboticist's education.
I was therefore caught off guard by
Kevin's nonchalant remark that " nobody
does grasping this way anymore. " It
should be noted that deep learning algorithms
for grasping were all the rage
then as now, and the prevailing mantra
among grasping researchers was, with
only slight exaggeration, " design a network,
collect data, and train. "
Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/MRA.2023.3266619
Date of current version: 15 June 2023
so, the question of how to define a core
curriculum for robotics is one that will
have profound consequences for how our
field evolves as an intellectual discipline.
In the coming months, you will see the
formation of a new IEEE Robotics and
Automation Society Education Activities
Board, one of whose first major activities
will be the creation of online educational
robotics content for our community.
Because our field is so dynamic, it is
especially important to always be challenging
our own assumptions about what
is important and relevant.
Going back to grasping, for now,
we have decided to keep the classical
material in future versions of the
book. While it is true that convolutional
neural networks and other deep learning
techniques have turned fields like
computer vision on their head, as many
researchers have pointed out,
these
new techniques also come with their
own set of baggage. Problems in robot6
IEEE
ROBOTICS & AUTOMATION MAGAZINE JUNE 2023
ics are particularly notorious for lack
of data; in order to make data-driven
methods work,
researchers are resorting
to data generated by physics-based
simulators that, you guessed it, are built
on analytical robot models. In an ironic
twist, some have even redesigned their
physical robots so that the model-based
computer simulations better agree with
the real data. For now, I would strongly
advise against
your classical books on robot modeling
and analysis.
I would like to close with the sad news
that Roger Ware Brockett, a pioneer in
mathematical systems theory and robotics
and one of the truly great minds of
our time, passed away on 19 March 2023.
During a career that spanned nearly fifty
years at Harvard and MIT, Roger made
seminal contributions to both nonlinear
systems theory and the scientific foundations
of robotics. From his discovery of
the product-of-exponentials formalism
for kinematic chains and the connections
between robot kinodynamics and the
theory of Lie groups and Lie algebras-
Roger likely deserves much of the credit
for terms like " SE(3) " having entered the
robotics vernacular-to nonholonomy
in robotics and the study of compliance,
Roger's contributions were deep
and profound. Roger also cared deeply
about teaching and gave much thought
to the question of what constitutes the
intellectual and scientific foundations of
robotics. His brilliance, generosity, and
kindness will be truly missed.
throwing away any of
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https://orcid.org/0000-0002-0293-6975
IEEE Robotics & Automation Magazine - June 2023

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