2025 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Japan is one of the leaders in the world in the field of robotics. They are strong in many sectors
of robotics including: space, manufacturing, service, security, education, and healthcare. Japan also has a long history of research and development in robotics, both in industry and academia. While Japan focuses on deep technical development, the United States tends to focus on applied robotics education, research, and development. To provide a graduate level, immersive, learning environment, we developed a joint program between The University of Washington (UW) and Shibaura Institute of Technology (SIT) to offer students an in-depth exploration of emerging trends in the Japanese robotics industry, focusing on the development of next-generation service robots. The program aims to enhance students’ technical competence and cross-cultural collaboration skills in the field of Human-Robot Interaction (HRI) . Through this two-week intensive course on Human Robot Interaction (HRI), and a project-based learning approach, students gained a comprehensive understanding of how robots sense, navigate, and interact with their environment, in diverse settings such as healthcare and logistics. The course provided an interdisciplinary and multicultural perspective on technology, business, and design aspects of robotic applications, highlighting differences between North American and Japanese practices. Additionally, the course was co-taught by robotics faculty from UW and SIT, plus the graduate students from UW were paired up with graduate students from SIT in project teams culminating in a hackathon learning experience integrating: human-centered design, design thinking, and technical hardware/software development. Students were also exposed to real-world deployments of robots in a variety of environments such as: cafes, service, and manufacturing company visits. Technical learning was achieved through interdisciplinary groups of students working together to ideate, develop, test, and iterate robotic solutions to using ROS2, Turtlebot3 robots, as well as a variety of sensors to study human-to-robot interaction plus robot-to-human interactions. To our knowledge, this was the first time a joint program on HRI has been offered with novel curricular design including an interdisciplinary approach to the relatively new field of HRI, including the in-depth exploration and analysis of potential business cases plus user-centered design. Through this multicultural, interdisciplinary (faculty and students), project-based, experiential learning environment, students with little-to-no technical backgrounds were able to use ROS2 with the Turtlebot3 robots with a multimodal sensor approach (audio, visual, biofeedback) and which the curricular design is transferable to courses and universities beyond UW and SIT, providing a model for integrating technical skills with hands-on learning in the field of Human-Robot Interaction (HRI).