The National Robotics Initiative: A Five-Year Retrospective

Abstract

The U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF), together with other federal agencies, launched the National Robotics Initiative (NRI) program in 2011. The aim of the NRI is to accelerate the development and use of collaborative robots (corobots), which work beside or cooperatively with people. To date, the NRI program has involved multiple directorates of the NSF (Computer and Information Science and Engineering; Engineering; Social, Behavioral, and Economic Sciences; and Education and Human Resources) and several other federal research funding agencies [the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), the National Institutes of Health (NIH), the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE), NASA, and the U.S. Department of Defense (DOD)]. As the program prepared to announce its sixth round of awards in the summer of 2017, we took the opportunity to reflect on the impacts of the first five years of NRI funding.