Autonomous Systems

• This page contains a diary of the course, filled with additional material, scientific publications, interesting links, etcetera. Check back regularly.

• The mailing list for the course is o8524-valvas@elvas.vub.ac.be, any questions, comments, or discussions are welcomed.

• The exam is scheduled on wednesday 9 June 2004 at 10h00. Location is to be announced. This will be a written exam; questions will be in English, but you are free to answer in Dutch or English.

• The exam of last year (Dutch only) is available for download (pdf, 66kB).

10/2/2004

Introduction

Slides (pdf, 1.6Mb)

Some Links

• Sebastian Thrun, robot builder at Carnegie Mellon.
• Marvin, a helicopter robot at the Technical University of Berlin.
• The NASA's Cool Robot of the Week page.
• Shakey, the first research robot at Stanford Research Institute, local mpg movie (124Mb).
• A general portal site to robots: robots.net.

16/2/2004

Electricity, electronics and the computational core of robots

Slides (pdf, 556kB)

Some links

• The Alan Turing homepage.
• Von Neumann architecture, entry in Wikipedia.
• Microprocessors, history and evolution, entry in Wikipedia.
   

23/2/2004

Sensors

Slides (pdf, 1.5Mb)

Slides

• Conrad, the on-line shop for the amateur robot tinkerer.

1/3/2004

Motors and actuators

Slides (pdf, 458kB)

Some links

• Maxon motors, manufacturer of precision motors (often used for robots, such as Mars rovers).

Manupilation and locomotion

Slides (pdf, 479 kB)
 

8/3/2004

Sensor-motor control

Slides (pdf, 260kB)

Some links

• Swarm intelligence starting page.
• Rodney Brooks, one of fathers of behaviour based robotics.
• An overview of the subsumption architecture for behaviour based robots.

Maps en path planning

Slides (pdf, 922kB)
 

15/3/2004

Pose maintenance

This lecture closely follows chapter 7 (pdf, 10.7Mb)  on pose maintenance from Dudek & Jenkin (2000) Computational principles of mobile robotics. Cambridge University Press. 

Slides (pdf, 3.2Mb)
 

22/3/2004

Vision on robots

Slides (pdf, 649kB)
 

29/3/2004

No lecture

6/4/2004

Easter holiday

13/4/2004

Easter holiday

19/4/2004

Stereo vision: lecture by Bart De Vylder

Slides (pdf, 1.8Mb)

26/4/2004

Learning robots

Note

• For an clear explanation of Q-learning, you might want to look at the chapter on Q-learning in Mitchell, T. (1997). Machine Learning. McGraw Hill. This is the book used in the Machine Learning course by Ann Nowé.
• The Matlab example of Q-learning from the course can be found here.

Some links

• Introduction to Genetic Algorithms by Maret Obitko.
• Introduction to reinforcement learning and Markov decision processes (together with Matlab demos).
• Online version of Sutton and Barto's book on reinforcement learning.

Slides (pdf, 980kB)
 

3/5/2004

Learning robots (continued)

10/5/2004

Artificial life

Some links

• Some Alife resources at University College London.

Slides (pdf, 4.9Mb)
 

17/5/2004

Social robotics

Some links

• Kismet on the web.

• The conference on epigenetic robotics 2004.

Slides (pdf, 1.1Mb)
 

11/2/2004

No exercises yet

18/2/2004

Exercises on basics of electronics

Exercises.
 

25/2/2004

no exercises today

3/3/2004

Theory of sensor-motor control (no exercises today).

10/3/2004

Exercises on sensors and sensor fusion

Exercises and solutions.

Additional websites in Dutch at KUL, and in English at SIAM and at UFC on GPS.

17/3/2004

Exercises on forward and inverse kinematics

24/3/2004

A homework on Localization: Introduction
Computer Vision

Exercises.
 

31/3/2004

Computer Vision (ctd)
 

6/4/2004

Easter holiday

13/4/2004

Easter holiday

21/4/2004

Lego Mindstorms exercises

Introduction to hardware and programming environment
 

28/4/2004

Lego Mindstorms exercises

Building a braitenberg vehicle
 

5/5/2004

Lego Mindstorms exercises

Q-Learning on robots

12/5/2004

Lego Mindstorms exercises

A contest: Introduction and rules

19/5/2004

Lego Mindstorms exercises

Preparing the contest