Master of Science in Robotics and Control Systems

MScPostgraduateComputer Science

Part Time Available

About This Programme

The College of Computing and Informatics is offering a Master of Science degree in Robotics and Control Systems (MSRCS), which is a credit-hour-based graduate degree program designed to prepare students for academic and research careers in the emerging and vital field of Robotics. The new generation of governments and businesses are highly relying on technology to optimize their productivity and services. The usage of automated vehicles such as robots and drones has been increasing in the last few years to efficiently provide different automated services in various critical fields such as public safety, transportation, and utilities. For example, the government of the United Arab Emirates has announced that there are plans to use unmanned aerial drones to deliver official documents and packages to its citizens as part of efforts to upgrade government services. Robotics is an interdisciplinary specialization that deals with designing, constructing, and operating robotic systems. The MSRCS program is developed by the College of Computing and Informatics in collaboration with the College of Engineering. The MSRCS program accepts students with B.Sc. degrees from different specializations in the College of Computing and Informatics and the College of Engineering, like Computer Engineering, Electrical Engineering, Computer Science, Mechatronics and Robotics, or related fields. Therefore, the University of Sharjah is offering the MSRCS to meet the requirements of society, and to support the vision of the UAE government to transform to smart services. The MSRCS program brings together scientific areas that would otherwise be spread across various departments or separate colleges. The program will focus on preparing students to take a leading role in the research and development of future generations of integrated robotics technologies and systems. The academic aim of this program is to provide students with advanced knowledge and skills in robotics by providing courses in various fields, e.g., Robotics, Autonomous Systems, Control Systems, Artificial Intelligence, Sensors, Embedded Systems, and Computational Vision. The intent is also to prepare students to engage in independent and collaborative research in academic, governmental, and industrial contexts. During this educative process, students will participate in knowledge generation and improvement, research synthesis, and knowledge/technology transfer. The implementation of this program is consistent with the vision and mission of the University of Sharjah (UoS), which is to educate through the academic process, to further human discovery through research, and to enhance wellbeing through involvement with the community. The proposed MSRCS program will benefit the University of Sharjah in many ways by: • Creating greater synergy between academia and the local/regional industry. • Contributing to the expansion of UoS research activities. • Bringing closer the IT industry in UAE and the region to UoS through expected collaboration on pressing IT problems affecting and directly related to the region. • Bringing additional international recognition to the University. The MSRCS graduates will, therefore, be contributing to the needs of the UAE and the region for highly qualified individuals in the field of Robotics. It is anticipated that between 8 to 12 students will join the program in its first years of inception and with the expectation that the number will increase in subsequent years, the number of faculty will increase, and more resources and funding will be allocated to the department. At the graduate level, this program is expected to equip its graduates with advanced technical knowledge and skills including skills of leadership, innovation, and entrepreneurship. A graduate from this program should be able to lead an enterprise’s effort in robotics automation planning, operation, management, and implementation. Should the graduate decide to continue in academia, this program will be a strong steppingstone towards advancements in research and scholarship. The core goal of the MSc degree in Robotics and Control Systems is twofold; firstly, enabling students by acquiring advanced knowledge in the different areas of the field of robotics, and secondly, empowering students with the ability to apply autonomous robotics techniques and methods in a variety of problems. Students are expected to solve problems of both a scientific and technological nature using state-of-the-art tools resulting from recent research.

Course Highlights

33 credit hours
Taught in English
College of Computing and Informatics
Study system: Courses and Theses
Full-time and part-time study
AED 3,200 per credit hour

What You'll Study

Degree Requirements • Compulsory courses (9 credit hours) • Elective Courses (15 credit hours) • Thesis (9 credit hours) Thesis Requirement (study plan document) In-depth research on a chosen topic, leading to a thesis that contributes to the field of robotics, supervised by a faculty member.

Year 1, Fall semester

9 credit hours

1502501Engineering Research Methodology3 credits
Prerequisite: Grad. Standing
Students learn how to apply the engineering research process and methods of inquiry to solve engineering problems. Literature survey for research work, building expertise in the areas of interest, this involves critiquing current research work. Basic principles of experimental designs; analyze and evaluate the results. Evaluate the quality of the results and limitations. They will also learn how to communicate findings in specific engineering formats to specialist audiences. Students will learn basic project management and teamwork skills in addition to research ethics. Course project will allow the students to apply research methodology components on research problems of their choice. Students, possibly in small teams, are expected to present and defend their research proposals.
1502631Autonomous Mobile Robot Navigation3 credits
Prerequisite: Grad. Standing
This course provides the basic concepts and algorithms for locomotion, perception, and intelligent navigation. Algorithms required to develop mobile robots that act autonomously in dynamic environments are covered. The main emphasis is put on mobile robot object recognition and obstacle avoidance. The fundamentals of robot navigation will be covered in detail; for example, the active vision concepts of foveation, saccadic eye movements, and attention will be discussed in terms of their operation and supported by practical examples. In addition, field stabilization including the pursuit of non-rigid targets in motion is also covered. Finally, path-planning and classification methods for robot navigation in relation to different types of robots such as wheeled robots, legged robots and drones will be studied.
Elective Course3 credits

Year 1, Spring semester

9 credit hours

0402531Control Engineering and Robotic Applications3 credits
Prerequisite: Grad. Standing
This course covers the tools and methods for control systems and robotics. The first part of this course will cover control systems theory, such as system modeling, state space representation, controllability and observability, stability analysis, controller design, and observer design. The second part presents the fundamentals of robotics systems, such as the main types of robotics systems and their application, modeling, and control design.
Elective Course3 credits
Elective Course3 credits

Year 2, Fall semester

9 credit hours

Elective Course3 credits
Elective Course3 credits
1502599Thesis3 credits
Prerequisite: Completion of at least 12 credits
The student has to undertake and complete a research topic under the supervision of a faculty member. The thesis work should provide the student with in-depth perspective of a particular research problem in the chosen field of specialization. It is anticipated that the student be able to carry out this research fairly independently under the direction of the supervisor. The student is required to submit a final thesis documenting the research and defend the work in front of a committee.

Year 2, Spring semester

6 credit hours (programme total: 33)

1502599Thesis6 credits
Prerequisite: Completion of at least 12 credits

Elective Courses (15 credit hours)

Five elective courses, chosen from this list. Appropriate mix of elective courses will be offered every semester allowing the students adequate choice in selecting the courses that meet their needs (study plan document).

1502630Computational Intelligence and Knowledge Engineering3 credits
Prerequisite: Grad. Standing
This course covers concepts, design, implementation of computational intelligence involving integration of different methodologies: intelligent database management systems, rule-based systems, neural-type systems and fuzzy systems for heuristic problem solving, diagnostics, risk analysis and decision support; decision trees, reasoning techniques.
1502534Neural Networks and Applications3 credits
Prerequisite: Grad. Standing
This course covers the fundamentals of supervised and unsupervised learning. Particularly, the course covers topics such as classical neural networks, deep learning and principal component analysis. Python programming will be introduced, along with Scikit-Learn and Keras.
1502642Computer Vision3 credits
Prerequisite: Grad. Standing
This course covers Image formation, Sampling, Quantization, Human Visual Perception System, Low-Level (Early) Visual processing, Image Filtering and Multi-Scale Representations, Color Analysis and Image Retrieval Principles, Motion and Stereo Analysis and Optical flow estimation Topics. The course also discusses topics in Machine Learning for Computer Vision as well as other advanced Recognition topics.
1502645Intelligent Sensors and Sensing Systems3 credits
Prerequisite: Grad. Standing
This intelligent sensors and sensing systems course presents the core theory and algorithms of signal processing fundamentals, and practical signal processing skills and strategies for real-world sensors and sensing systems applications. The course covers analysis of sensor data using spatial filtering and frequency-domain and statistical analysis. It also provides basic concepts and algorithms for intelligent systems that utilize advanced signal and sensor data processing.
1502625Computational Robotics3 credits
Prerequisite: Grad. Standing
This course is an introduction to computational robotics covering AI foundations of robots and introducing AI framework based on soft real-time control. It will also provide students with the necessary skills to understand how robots observe and act upon their surroundings through an iterative execution of Observe-Orient-Decide-Act sensing. The concept of sensing and perception estimation challenges including the robot localization, simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM) will also be covered. Planning methods will be introduced including the configuration space abstraction and sampling-based planners. Students will be actively engaged in a series of projects covering various robotic problems using a set of toolbox algorithms to experiment with the methods and principles. The results of the applications will be discussed in class.
1502615Applied Artificial Intelligence for Robotics3 credits
Prerequisite: Grad. Standing
This course focuses on applications of artificial intelligence (AI) algorithms for robotics; including basics of AI technology for intelligent robot localization, path planning, perception and sensing, robot intelligence and robot software autonomy architecture, and AI algorithms applied to robot path-planning, localization, and object tracking. The course also provides an introduction to Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM) algorithm. Tools such as Python programming and MATLAB will be used in this course.
1502655Special Topics in Robotics Applications3 credits
Prerequisite: Grad. Standing
Advanced and emerging topics are selected from the area of Robotics Applications. Contents of the course will be provided one semester before it is offered.
1502660Embedded Systems for Robotics3 credits
Prerequisite: Grad. Standing
This course covers the use of embedded systems in the field of robotics. The course covers the use of an embedded system for the integration of robot sensors and actuators, the implementation of robotic control systems, and robot kinematics and locomotion control. The course will also include discussion of robot operating systems and real-time operation. Students will be expected to complete a project involving the use of a microcontroller-based embedded system to meet specifications for a robotic system.
1502635Independent Studies in Robotics3 credits
Prerequisite: Grad. Standing
The student is expected to carry out an independent study on a current issue in a selected area of Robotics. This study is to be supervised by a faculty member and requires the approval of the department. The student is required to produce a formal report, which will be evaluated by his instructor. Contents of the course will be provided one semester before it is offered.
1502650Sequential Decision Making in Robotics3 credits
Prerequisite: Grad. Standing
This course focuses on how robots make decisions in dynamic changing environments. To do so, robots need to learn from experience and perform complex decision-making tasks under uncertainty. Topics to be covered include, Markov decision processes, partial observability, reinforcement learning, bandit problems, sequential search, reasoning and learning in games and algorithms with performance guarantees. The discussed techniques will be agnostic to the type of robot used and can be applied across various applications. Then we will cover the recent advances in path planning and decision-making problems of recent applications including manipulation, vehicle navigation, and marine robotics. Substantial class participation is expected from all students, who will be required to give course presentations and scribe the outcome of discussions.
1502670Medical Robotics3 credits
Prerequisite: Grad. Standing
This course covers the design and control of robots for medical applications. The course discusses the use of robots for healthcare including surgical, assistive, and rehabilitation robots. The course will also cover essential skills in ethics, design, IP and economic considerations. The course will introduce the use of artificial intelligence techniques in medical robotics. Students are expected to complete and present a literature survey related to latest research developments in aspects of medical robotics.
0402633Modelling and Control of Industrial Robots3 credits
Prerequisite: Grad. Standing
This course deals with the modeling and control of open-chain serial manipulator and their basic applications. Topics include an overview of robotic systems, serial manipulator, forward kinematic, inverse kinematics, Jacobian and forward velocity kinematics, inverse velocity kinematics, motion control and trajectory design.
0402530Linear Multi-Variable Control Systems3 credits
Prerequisite: Grad. Standing
This course deals with modeling and control of linear multivariable systems. State space representation of multivariable systems. Linear algebra background. Modeling of multivariable systems. Realization theory. Controllability and observability. Minimality. Stability. State feedback and Estimation. Separation theorem. Output Feedback. Compensation.
0402532Non-Linear System Analysis and Design3 credits
Prerequisite: Grad. Standing
This course deals with nonlinear systems dynamics. It includes: Linearization, iteration and perturbation analysis; Phase plane method. Describing functions analysis; Limit cycles; Lyapunov stability; Input/output stability; Input/output linearization; Stabilization and control of nonlinear systems.
0402534Advanced Robotics: Modeling and Control3 credits
Prerequisite: Grad. Standing
This course provides an in-depth understanding of the principles and techniques for modeling and controlling various types of robots, including mobile robots, industrial robot manipulators, and Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs). Emphasis is placed on the derivation of kinematic and dynamic models, control system design, and practical applications in robotics.

The course descriptions title 0402532 Non-Linear Systems Analysis and Design and 1502599 Master’s Thesis.

What You'll Learn

Upon the successful completion of the program, students should be able to: • Apply advanced theories and methodologies in the field of Robotics and Control Systems. • Propose advanced engineering solutions with sustainability factors in global, economic, environmental, and societal context. • Communicate effectively in oral and written forms to present complex and diverse problems to professional audience. • Evaluate the principles of professional ethics issues and develop fair and valid judgments in contemporary contexts. • Work within multidisciplinary teams with management and leadership capabilities. • Design and conduct experiments/simulation for research. • Use advanced engineering tools to analyze and interpret data

Entry Requirements

Academic: Admission requirements for master programs: • The student must hold a bachelor's degree or equivalent from a recognized university with a CGPA of 3.00 out of 4.00. • Students with a CGPA between 2.5 and 2.99 may be admitted conditionally. • The degree must be in a major that qualifies the student to study the master's program. • Students must meet the English language proficiency requirement. • Attachment of ‘no objection of study certificate’ from the authorities responsible for national service for male Emirati students (ages from 18 to 30 years old). • Attachment of a letter of study approval from the Kuwait Embassy Cultural Office for Kuwaiti students only. • Attachment of People of Determination card (if applicable). • In case the student works in a certain place, please attach a letter from the employer stating that the student is working for this agency. • For individuals with foreign qualifications, it is necessary to provide a Certificate of Equivalency.

English: For programs taught in English, a score of 550 in TOEFL (ITP) (or its equivalence), or 6 in IELTS must be obtained. Native English speakers are exempt from the English proficiency requirement if the language of instruction for their undergraduate studies was English. Additionally, students who graduated from academic institutions where English is used as the primary medium of instruction for bachelor’s studies are also exempt. Equivalent scores (EmSAT / paper-based TOEFL ITP / IELTS academic): 950-1075 / 450 / 4.5; 1100-1225 / 500 / 5.0; 1250-1375 / 530 / 5.5; 1400-1525 / 550 / 6.0. The paper-based TOEFL ITP is offered only by the University of Sharjah, AMIDEAST Dubai, and Abu Dhabi head offices. The UoS reserves the right to require students to attend an interview in the Languages Institute. Students may be required to take a further in-house test to ensure their scores are consistent with their English Language proficiency.

Careers

The increased integration of robotics in several modern complex tasks suggests that intelligent robots are poised to be a leading career in the next decade. For example, a study conducted by Oxford Economics expects that the number of robots can reach up to 20 million by 2030 in the world. Therefore, there will be a critical need to hire many robotics experts to design, manufacture, and operate these robots in the next few years. In the same context, the UAE is a globally leading nation in technology and automation. The UAE has plans to integrate robots in several vivid fields such as healthcare, agriculture, defense, governmental services, and others. The graduates are expected to find jobs in sectors such as industry, commerce, government, educational institutions, and research centers. Potential jobs include: • Robotics & Control Systems Engineers • Autonomous Robotics Design Engineers. • Artificial Intelligence Software Developers. • Robotics Test Engineers. • Machine Learning & Computer Vision Engineers. • Advanced Robotics Researchers.