Spring 2017 Course Information for Spring 2017
Time: TR 8-9:15 (lecture), R 1-2:20, 2:30-3:50 (lab)
Place: Davis 117 (lecture), Davis 122 (lab)
Instructor Information
Prof. Bruce A. Maxwell
Office: Davis 112
Office hours: Knock
M 9:30-late
R 7:30-late
Course Description
Robotics addresses the problems of controlling and motivating mechanical devices to act intelligently in dynamic, unpredictable environments. Major topics will include sensing, navigation and control, mapping and localization, robot perception using vision and sonar, and robot kinematics. In addition to short homework assignments, students will undertake more extensive projects using both existing software and implementing their own algorithms on medium sized mobile robots capable of functioning in human spaces. Projects will focus on enabling the robots to execute tasks, explore, and interact with people and objects in their environment.
Textbooks
- R. Siegwart and I. Nourbakhsh, Introduction to Autonomous Mobile Robots, 2nd Ed., MIT Press, Cambridge Mass, 2011.
- Handouts
Useful Links
- Maxwell's Lecture notes
- IR Sensor operation and variety
- Makefile tutorial
- Robotics papers
- Sutton and Bart, Reinforcement Learning: An Introduction, MIT Press.
- RL Video 1
- Deep Reinforcement Learning
- RL Video 2
- Localization using particle filters, (Dellaert, Fox, Burgard, and Thrun 1999).
- Sloman and Croucher, "Why Robots Will Have Emotions", IJCAI 1981..
