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CSE 498F
Behavior-Based Robotics

Spring 2004

Syllabus

CSE 498F  "Behavior-Based Robotics" (3 - 0 - 0)

This course is designed to provide a forum for applying and testing artificial intelligence methods and models, especially behavior-based techniques, on a robot. While models will be evaluated with respect to their theoretical tenability (i.e., conceptual clarity, support by empirical data, plausibility), most emphasis will be given to issues of practicality (i.e., feasibility of implementation, real-time/real-world issues, computational resources, etc.) These practical considerations will be extensively studied in simulations as well as real-world implementations on a variety of robots.  Implementations might also comprise new ideas hopefully giving rise to original research results.

Required Course Text:

Arkin, C. Ronald (1998), Behavior-Based Robotics, MIT Press, Cambridge: MA.

Additional Readings:

Pfeiffer, R.. and  Scheier, Ch. (1999) Understanding Intelligence.  MIT Press, Cambridge: MA.
Murphy, R. (2002) Introduction to AI Robotics. 2nd ed.  MIT Press, Cambridge: MA.

In addition, various articles (TBA depending on the particular projects).

Professor-in-Charge: Virgil Andronache

E-mail: vandrona@cse.nd.edu
Office: 352/355S Fitzpatrick Hall
Office Hours: T , Th 2-4
Phone: (574) 631- 8380

Course Goals:

Students should develop the ability to work in interdisciplinary groups on original complex software projects incorporating results from various different subdisciplines in AI to solve concrete problems defined in the context of a set of tasks for a robotic agent.  Solutions will be implemented, tested and evaluated on various robotic platforms.

 Topics:  Number of lectures 
 Introduction to behavior-based robotics
6
 The AGES development environment and the available robots 
3
 Basic agent architectures for robots
6
 Reactive systems
6
 Deliberative systems
6
 Hybrid systems
6

Note that the number of lectures on each topic (as well as some of the various subtopics covered by the lectures) may vary depending on the respective research projects picked by students.

Computer Usage:

Programming in the course will be done in JAVA and possibly other languages depending on individual  preferences.

Grading:

The main goal of this course is to get the robot to do something interesting.  Hence, students will spend most of their time working in groups (consisting of two to four members) on a project of their choice.  They will start working on it as early as the third week of classes and present regular progress reports in class (each group member will have to present at least once).  At the end of the semester, groups will turn in a project report written in the style of a conference contribution (ideally, this is what it could be used for!).  Their grade will reflect to a large part the quality of their attempts of getting their models to work, but will also depend on the final report and on class presentations.

The following weights will be used to compute the final grade:

The following grade breakdown will be used:
 
 92 - 100  A 
 89 - 91  A-
 86 - 88   B+
 82 - 85  B
 79 - 81  B-
 76 - 78  C+
 72 - 75  C
 69 - 71  C-
 62 - 68  D
   0 - 61  F
This page is maintained by:
Virgil Andronache
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All rights reserved.
Last revised on January 13, 2004