Honors Students to Join in Foundational Research

This spring, four OU honors students will help to lay the foundation for a new research area -- robot-to-robot nurturing. At the same time, they will be pioneering a new mechanism for connecting research and teaching.

Nurturing is a fundamental concept in biology, cognitive science, psychology, child development, sociology, and education, among other disciplines, and serves as the focus of extensive research enterprises. Prof Hougen and his research team, known as the Robotics, Evolution, Adaptation, and Learning Laboratory (REAL Lab), believe that nurturing should likewise be considered a fundamental concept in robotics, with an active research community built around it for both scientific and practical reasons. From a scientific standpoint, there is much to be learned concerning connections between the evolution of nurturing and the evolution of learning, communication, empathy, and related capabilities, both in natural and in artificial systems. From a practical standpoint, robots that can nurture other robots makes extensive robot learning practical and thus enables much greater robot intelligence.

Prof Hougen and the REAL Lab have begun to build the robotics nurturing research community here at OU with the help of OU programs including a grant through the Potentially Transformative Research, Scholarship and Creative Activity Program of the Office of the Vice President for Research and The OU Research Council and the Honors Research Assistantship Program of the OU Honors College.

This spring this REAL Lab initiative will benefit from another OU program -- the Honors Engineering Research Experience (HERE) program. Under this new program, four honors undergraduate students will earn course credit while conducting research. The objective of this course is to provide these students with authentic research experiences by integrating them into the REAL Lab and having them work through the research experience with the research team. And they won't be just doing grunt work, either. Together with the team they will develop specific testable hypotheses related to the topic of robotic nurturing; design, code, and conduct experiments to test these hypotheses; and collect, analyze, and report on the results found -- in short, they will be involved in the entire research process as full members of the research team.

The HERE program will help to formalize the process of involving some of OU's best and brightest students with an innovative research agenda that promises great things. The results are expected to be a model of Sooner excellence.