Establishing New Mexico Tech’s First AI-Humanoid Robotics Research Testbed through Undergraduate Capstone Teams and Graduate Research Mentors

The objective of this project is to establish New Mexico Tech’s first AI-enabled humanoid robotics research testbed through a structured undergraduate research and capstone framework supported by graduate student mentoring within the ARISE Lab. The project is designed to expand meaningful undergraduate research opportunities while building long-term research capacity in humanoid robotics, intelligent systems, and digital twin technologies.

The proposed work directly supports undergraduate research by engaging students as primary contributors in system design, modeling, hardware implementation, and experimental validation. Rather than serving as assistants, undergraduate students will lead subsystem development within clearly defined research groups. This structure ensures that students experience the full research lifecycle: requirements definition, modeling, prototyping, testing, validation, and dissemination.