Vocabulary / grad-school specific terms:
GRA / GTA: Graduate Research Associate and Graduate Teaching Associate, respectively. This means the institution pays you to either do research or teach for them. Most of the time, payment includes a tuition waiver (i.e. you don’t have to pay for tuition) and a stipend (small paycheck).
Fellowship: Essentially free money. Same payment structure as a GRA / GTA, but there’s no explicit requirement for you to teach classes or do specific research.
Rotation: Most graduate students are tied to a specific professor and research project from day one. OSU robotics allows (some) students to rotate through a few (2-3) professors their first year to figure out where they fit and what kind of research they really want to do. This is rather unique and a really awesome way to go about it.
Semantic mapping: Most autonomous systems cannot tell a chair from a table or a horse. The field of semantic mapping seeks to fix that by enabling a broader understanding of the world and its components.
Multi-agent Systems: A multi-agent system is a system of robots (typically different kinds of bots) that all work together to accomplish a common goal.
HRI: Human-Robot Interaction. Pretty much what it sounds like – this is the study of what happens when humans and robots meet (both on the 1:1 scale and how robotics integrates with society as a whole.) I would like to pursue this from a broader perspective – how do we effectively integrate new technologies with society, ethics, policy, and law.
Rabble of Robots 