2026 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Japan is one of the global leaders in robotics, excelling in areas such as space, manufacturing, service, security, education, and healthcare. With its long history of research and development in both academia and industry, Japan emphasizes deep technical innovation, while the United States has traditionally focused on applied robotics education, research, and development. Building on these complementary strengths, we developed a joint interdisciplinary program between a university in the U.S. plus a university in Tokyo, designed to immerse both graduate and undergraduate students in emerging trends in robotics with a particular focus on Human-Robot Interaction (HRI).
Last year, the first iteration of the program took the form of a two-week, on-site intensive course in Tokyo, where students worked in interdisciplinary, cross-cultural teams to design, prototype, and evaluate service robots using ROS 2, the Turtlebot3 platform, and multimodal sensing technologies. While successful in cultivating technical and intercultural competencies, feedback from students, faculty, and colleagues at the ASEE 2025 Annual Conference highlighted opportunities to extend the timeline, deepen engagement with business considerations, and allow more iterative development cycles.
This summer, the second iteration of the program addressed these needs through a redesigned five-week format, consisting of three weeks of hybrid-online learning followed by two weeks of immersive, on-site classes in Tokyo. This structure enabled students to begin development of technical skills such as ROS 2 prior to arriving at the university in Tokyo. In addition, the curriculum was expanded to explicitly integrate business justification as a core component. Students were tasked not only with developing functional prototypes but also with articulating viable business models and market entry strategies that considered both Japanese and U.S. contexts.
As in the initial offering, the program emphasized interdisciplinary collaboration and human-centered design, with project teams co-taught and mentored by faculty from both U.S. and Japan universities. Also, the curriculum in Tokyo included company visits enabling students to engage with real-world deployments of service robots in cafés, healthcare, and manufacturing settings, and to then draw on these experiences to inform design decisions for their prototypes. The program culminated in a hackathon-style showcase, where student teams presented both their working prototypes plus accompanying business justifications, highlighting usability, cultural adaptation, and economic feasibility.
Our findings from this second iteration suggest that extending the program’s duration and explicitly embedding business justification within the design process significantly enhanced both technical and professional learning outcomes. Students reported stronger team cohesion, deeper technical skill development, and increased confidence in their ability to frame robotic solutions within real-world cultural and economic contexts. The hybrid-plus-immersion model also offers a flexible framework that can be adapted to other international collaborations in robotics education, providing a replicable model for integrating technical, human-centered, and business perspectives in the emerging field of HRI.