In 2022, Plymouth State University received $1 million in federal funding to build a new robotics laboratory on campus for its new robotics program. Two years later, the building has been completed and is open for use by the growing robotics program, the first of its kind in New Hampshire.
The new facility is 4,000 square feet and includes new workspaces, a production floor, classrooms, and a collection of advanced robots. It was modeled to enhance the university's multidisciplinary approach to education.
The fourth floor of the new facility is home to the robotics open lab, which has 1,200 square feet of workstations, as well as the computer science and math departments. The building also houses maker spaces and an art department to encourage cross-collaboration on all aspects of robot development.
“We are capable of handling probably three times as many students as we have. I would see the program itself being able to grow threefold now that we're off the ground,” said Brett Kulakovich.
In 2021, Plymouth State University became the first higher education institution in New Hampshire to offer a bachelor’s in robotics degree.
Along with the unveiling of the robotics institute comes a new program: the One Robot program.
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The program provides every student with a robot, which costs roughly $1,000 each, and they get to keep it upon graduation from the university. According to Kulakovich, keeping and being responsible for a robot enables students to take more risks and work on longer-term projects without the limitations of supply and lack of space.
Kulakovich said that providing the students with their own robot allows them to make mistakes and learn from them. This enables students to customize their robots without the fear of destroying school property, and “if you break it, it’s yours; now you have to unbreak it,” Kulakoivch said.
The program is still in its infancy, but already students have produced projects that range from using an idle robot to reduce a person's workload by two hours a day to developing a robot with AI and image recognition to study, examine, and classify clean drive chains.
“FANUC is the number one robotics manufacturer and industrial installer on Earth, and they're the ones that are really kind of pushing the buttons, talking about the number of robots they're selling right now… the number of orders they have and that they have filled already leaves a 1 million person shortfall,” Kulakovich said “There just aren't enough people to run all the robots that they've sold. So that, in and of itself, gives us not just a window of opportunity but a terrific application here to propel people into an incredible career.”
