Updated list of topics

Class material - handouts

The course will cover basic principles of design and practice of intelligent robotics systems. We will cover algorithms for the analysis of the data obtained by vision and ultrasound sensors and the design of reactive control strategies which comprise basic capabilities of the mobile robot. Notion of robot's configuration space and geometric and topological representations of the environment will be introduced and followed by different motion planning techniques for searching these continuos and discrete state space representations. Issues of integration will be examined in the context of different modeling paradigms for representing spatial properties, reasoning about environment and decision making with the emphasis on navigation, pose maintenance and exploration. Examples of these include hierarchical deterministic models of interacting finite state machines, hybrid systems models and more recently popularized probabilistic models. We will study and formulate interesting robotics tasks and show how they can be accomplished by individual robot or cooperative robot teams (such as flocking, foraging as well as robotic soccer).

The topics and techniques covered are relevant for students interested in robotics, computer vision, artificial intelligence as well as modeling and programming of complex distributed embedded systems which interact with dynamically changing environments. Programming aspects in the context of these types of systems will be also part of the course.

The course will comprise from lectures by the instructor and discussion and presentations of the selected research publications by students. The grade will be predominantly based on participation in class, discussions, presentation and projects. The projects will involve implementation of a systems in a mobile robot simulator and/or the actual mobile robot.

Prerequisites:
CS 580 Artificial Intelligence
optional prerequisites - Computer Vision and Analysis of Algorithms

Textbook:
G. Dudek and M. Jenkin: Computational Principles of Mobile Robotics. Cambridge University Press 2000
R. Murhy: Introduction to AI Robotics, MIT Press 2000

Suggested Readings:
T. Dean and M. Wellman: Planning and Control. Morgan Kaufmann Publishers, 1991.
S. Russell and P. Norvig: Artificial Intelligence,  Prentice Hall, 1995
R.  Arkin: Behavior-Based Robotics, MIT Press, 1998
J-C. Latombe:  Robot Motion Planning,  Kluwer Academic Publishers 1991.

Tentative List of Topics: