Department of Computer Science   

   CSCI 485

Robotics

Catalog Description: An introduction to the fundamentals of mobile robotics including robot hardware, sensors, obstacle avoidance, navigation, mapping, path planning and robot architectures.

Topics

Text

Schedule

1Thursday, August 23
Introduction and Syllabus
2Tuesday, August 28 Thursday, August 30
Chapter 1
Overview		 Chapter 2
Bug Algorithms
3Tuesday, September 4Thursday, September 6
Chapter 2
Sensor Processing and Types 		Chapter 3
Configuration and Space
4Tuesday, September 11Thursday, September 13
Chapter 3
Transforming Configuration and Velocity		 Chapter 4
Potential Functions
wavefront tutorial using iCreate
5Tuesday, September 18Thursday, September 20
Appendix G
Analysis of Algorithms and Complexity Classes		 Chapter 5
Roadmaps
6Tuesday, September 25Thursday, September 27
Appendix D
Curve Tracing		 Chapter 6
Cell Decomposition
7Tuesday, October 2Thursday, October 4
Chapter 6
Cell Decomposition		 Chapter 7
Sampling Bases Algorithms
8Tuesday, October 9Thursday, October 11
Chapter 7
Sampling Bases Algorithms		 Appendix I
Statistics Primer
9Tuesday, October 16Thursday, October 18
Appendix J
Linear Systems and Control 		Chapter 8
Kalman Filtering
10Tuesday, October 23Thursday, October 25
Chapter 8
Kalman Filtering 		Chapter 9
Bayesian Methods
11Tuesday, October 30Thursday, November 1
Chapter 9
Bayesian Methods 		Chapter 10
Robot Dynamics
12Tuesday, November 6Thursday, November 8
Chapter 10
Robot Dynamics 		Chapter 10
Robot Dynamics
13Tuesday, November 13Thursday, November 15
Chapter 11
Trajectory Planning 		Chapter 11
Trajectory Planning
14Tuesday, November 20Thursday, November 22
THANKSGIVING HOLIDAY THANKSGIVING HOLIDAY
15Tuesday, November 27Thursday, November 29
Chapter 11
Trajectory Planning 		Chapter 12
Nonholonomic and Underactuated Systems
16Tuesday, December 4Thursday, December 6
Chapter 12
Nonholonomic and Underactuated Systems 		Chapter 12
Nonholonomic and Underactuated Systems
17Tuesday, December 11Thursday, December 13
Final Exam 1:30 p.m.

Interesting Links

Lejos and Lego Mindstorm Kit

On Derivitives

Other places

Robots Surf the Web to Learn About the World New Scientist (08/18/07) Vol. 195, No. 2617, P. 22; Reilly, Michael Robots and computer programs are learning to associate words with objects by going online and Googling the words, using the retrieved images to make the connection. "If you give a robot visual capabilities, it could pretty much do anything," argues the University of Maryland in College Park's Alap Karapurkar. Carnegie Mellon University researcher Paul Rybski goes a step further. He says, "You could tell a robot, 'car,' and it could learn what a car looks like, that they're used for driving, then it could download a driver's manual, hop in the car and drive away." Rybski and colleague Alexei Efros put together the first Semantic Robot Vision Challenge at the annual American Association for Artificial Intelligence conference to test the theory. The competition involved instructing robots to search the Internet for images relevant to 20 object words, and then look for the objects in a 6-meter-square area. Robots were entered in the contest by five teams. The first step for the robots was converting the hundreds of images resulting from queries into descriptions that could be used to identify objects in the real world, and this was achieved through the use of software that analyzes the shading patterns in all of the resulting images to outline telltale characteristics and organize them into a sort of fingerprint. Several robots were equipped with stereo cameras to search for objects, which took snapshots for comparison to the fingerprint index. The robot that scored the highest--seven out of 20 found objects--was built by a team of University of British Columbia researchers. The software the robots run on could be applied to the significant improvement of Web image searches. http://technology.newscientist.com/channel/tech/mg19526175.500-robots-surf-the-web-to-learn-about-the-world.html
http://cordis.europa.eu/fetch?CALLER=EN_NEWS&ACTION=D&RCN=28240
Direct Brain-to-Game Interface Worries Scientists http://www.wired.com/medtech/health/news/2007/09/bci_games
Q&A with Robin Marantz Henig, author of NYTimes Magazine article on sociable robots http://blogs.spectrum.ieee.org/automaton/2007/08/31/qa_with_robin_marantz_henig_au.html
http://www.h2orobots.org/fallindex.htm http://nventivity.com/ROVIAB.html