WARREN ? Middle- and High-School students from around Michigan have been invited to Macomb Community College May 4-5 to learn about future, attainable careers in robotics and engineering and see the latest trends for semi-autonomous robotics in action. The event ? ?Robotics, Engineering and Technology Week? ? is being hosted for the fourth consecutive year by the U.S. Army Tank Automotive Research, Development and Engineering Center.

According to Dr. Jim Overholt, U.S. Army TARDEC Senior Research Scientist in Robotics, students will be surprised by the wide array of robotics careers available, including those with the Army. ?The growth of robotics technology is going to have a significant impact on how people live, play and work worldwide,? he explained. ?Part of that growth includes careers in robotics ? one of the many occupational fields available within the Department of Defense and especially TARDEC.?

At RET Week, groups of students from around Michigan will gather at the Macomb Community College Sports & Expo Center and hear from leading experts, see demonstrations of current robots and participate in a robot-building challenge. The course from the popular 2010 FIRST (For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology) competition will also be on display. In the FIRST robotics category, high school student teams had six weeks to build robots from a kit containing hundreds of parts. The robots competed for awards in Breakaway, a soccer-like game that required them to climb obstacles to score goals against their opponents. TARDEC is the state?s largest supporter of FIRST.

?Events like RET Week and FIRST are important to TARDEC and our Nation because they help lay the groundwork for the future of Michigan?s engineering and technical work force,? Overholt said.

Since RET Week?s inception in 2007, thousands of students have attended these informative sessions and robotics demonstrations.

The Army has approximately 8,000 robots currently fielded in conflict areas today.

According to the blog Automaton, the robot population on Earth now stands at approximately 8.6 million units. That figure includes 1.3 million industrial robots and 7.3 million service robots serving manufacturing, government, domestic and military applications.

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