Two other texts are recommended as background reading for the course. They are: Vehicles, Experiments in Synthetic Psychology by Valentino Braitenberg, and Artificial Intelligence, A Modern Approach by S. Russell and P. Norvig. These will be available on reserve at the library.
Course objective and description
The objective of this course is to use a hands-on approach to introduce the basic concepts in robotics, focusing on mobile robots and illustrations of current state of the art research and applications. Course information will be tied to lab experiments; students will work in teams to build and test increasingly more complex LEGO-based mobile robots, culminating in an end-of-semester robot contest.The course will use the LEGO robot kits
to cover and illustrate the historical development of robotics as a
field, the importance of integrating sensors, effectors and control,
basic control, the key approaches to mobile robot control (reactive,
behavior-based, and hybrid), and briefly discuss robot learning and
multi-robot systems. Additionally, several guest presenters will
describe state-of-the-art in robotics research. In the lab, robot kits
will be used in weekly exercises illustrating lecture material; the
last month of the lab will be spent in applying the learned material
to a final project, in which the students will design and build a
robot for a final competition.
