Spring 2016
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From the surface of Mars and the far reaches of our Solar System to the bottom of the ocean, robots are helping us expand our scientific understanding of the universe. In our everyday life, devices that gather information and interact with the environment are ever-present, taking over many of the undesirable or dangerous tasks that humans had to perform previously. Fundamental to all these robotic devises is their ability to sense the environment, reason about it, and then plan and safely execute the best action. This course is designed as an advance graduate course with a focus on design and operation of robot systems; dynamics, control, and motion trajectories of mobile robots; vision, LIDAR, SONAR and tactile sensing systems; state estimation; planning and learning.
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At the beginning we will discuss how robots move and interact with their environment. Among other topics we will examine the underlying hardware enabling mobility, kinematics and inverse kinematics, and also the differences between manipulators and mobile robotic systems. Perception of the environment is another fundamental skill for intelligent systems. Sensors, sensor data interpretation, and sensor fusion would be presented next, including recent advances in the field of sensor networks. Reasoning about the environment and the actions a robot takes is the third area we would cover in this course. This would include path planning for mobile robots and configuration spaces for manipulators. The task of mapping, with the underpinning concepts of position estimation and localization, will be explored. We will go over the notion of multi-agent systems, and finally look at applications of robotics in the real world. |
The course material would cover the fundamentals of intelligent robotic systems with special focus on the computational aspects. The students would also have the chance to apply some of the theoretical concepts seen in class on a mobile robot (TurtleBot, Parrot AR drone 2.0). The instructor would draw from his experiences in robotic research to enrich the material with aspects of active research problems, such as: multi-robot coverage for humanitarian de-mining; environmental coral reef monitoring using an underwater robot; robotic planetary exploration; etc. Even though the focus of this course is on mobile robotics, the methodologies discussed can be applied to a variety of computer systems equipped with sensors and actuators.
Instructor
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Resources
Exam Questions
Lecture Notes
Video for the Lecture of 01/12/2016: Introduction WMV format and Introduction MP4 format
Video for the Lecture of 01/14/2016: History WMV format and History MP4 format
Learn ROS
In this class we will use ROS (Robot Operating System), this week, read this introduction, install ROS on your machine (using linux), and go through the beginner tutorials. You can also refer to the following book A Gentle Introduction to ROSBook
Computational Principles of Mobile RoboticsROS Wiki
Midterm Exam: 03/03/2016
Final Exam: TBA
Assignments
| Description |
code |
worlds |
Due date |
| Assignment 1 | |
02/02/2016 |
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| Assignment 2 | potential_field.cpp | A2World.tgz |
02/25/2016 |
| Assignment 3 | grid_mapper.zip | |
03/17/2016 |
| Assignment 4 | |
04/05/2016 |
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| Assignment 5 | |
04/21/2016 |