Embodiment of computers and computer controlled devices in the physical world is making tremendous strides in many areas, daily briging new applications and requirements towards reliable and long term employment of complex systems, dynamically changing environments. Mobile robotics carries the challenges distributed embedded systems systems face and provides so needed physical embodiment of existing and newly developed algorithms and theories. The focus of this course will be on obtaining some knowledge and hands on experience in this area.

The course will cover basic principles of design and practice of autonomous mobile robots. We will cover algorithms for the analysis of the data obtained by vision and ultrasound sensors and the design of control strategies which comprise basic capabilities of the mobile robot. Various alternatives of representation of robot's environment will be introduced and followed by different motion planning techniques for searching these continuos and discrete state space representations. Issues of integration will be examined in the context of different modeling paradigms for representing spatial properties, reasoning about environment and decision making with the emphasis on navigation, pose maintenance and exploration. We will study and formulate interesting robotics tasks and show how they can be accomplished by individual robot or cooperative robot teams (such as flocking, foraging as well as robotic soccer).

The course will comprise from lectures by the instructor and discussion and presentations of the selected topics by students. The grade will be predominantly based on homeworks, midterm exam participation in class and final project. The projects will involve implementation of a systems in a mobile robot simulator and/or the actual mobile robot.

The topics and techniques covered are relevant for students interested in robotics, computer vision, artificial intelligence as well as modeling and programming of complex embedded systems which interact with dynamically changing environments. Programming aspects in the context of these types of systems will be also part of the course.