COMP417 Introduction to Robotics and Intelligent Systems
Fall 2013

From the surface of Mars and the far reaches of our Solar System to the bottom of the ocean, robots are helping us expand our scientific understanding of the universe. In our everyday life, devices that gather information and interact with the environment are ever-present, taking over many of the undesirable or dangerous tasks that humans had to perform previously. Fundamental to all these robotic devises is their ability to sense the environment, reason about it, and then plan and safely execute the best action. This course is designed as an introduction to the generic field of robotics.

Syllabus



 

  At the beginning we will discuss how robots move and interact with their environment. Among other topics we will examine the underlying hardware enabling mobility, kinematics and inverse kinematics, and also the differences between manipulators and mobile robotic systems. Perception of the environment is another fundamental skill for intelligent systems. Sensors, sensor data interpretation, and sensor fusion would be presented next, including recent advances in the field of sensor networks. Reasoning about the environment and the actions a robot takes is the third area we would cover in this course. This would include path planning for mobile robots and configuration spaces for manipulators. The task of mapping, with the underpinning concepts of position estimation and localization, will be explored. We will go over the notion of multi-agent systems, and finally look at applications of robotics in the real world.

The course material would cover the fundamentals of intelligent robotic systems with special focus on the computational aspects. The students would also have the chance to apply some of the theoretical concepts seen in class on a mobile robot (Boebot). The instructor would draw from his experiences in robotic research to enrich the material with aspects of active research problems, such as: multi-robot coverage for humanitarian de-mining; environmental coral reef monitoring using an underwater robot; robotic planetary exploration; etc. Even though the focus of this course is on mobile robotics, the methodologies discussed can be applied to a variety of computer systems equipped with sensor and actuators.

Instructor

Teaching assistant
 

Lecture notes are posted here


Euler (gimbal lock) explanation video

Final Exam: Dec. 5th 18:00-21:00 LEA 109

Midterm in class: TBD


Assignments

Description
code
worlds
Due date
Assignment 0

17 Sept. 2013
Assignment 1 grid_mapper.zip
Worlds.tgz left-corridor-mapping.bag
15 Oct. 2013
GVG-related Projects Single Robot Code

Dec. 2013
Feature DetectionProjects Notes
Rosbag from Aqua
Dec. 2013
See: http://moodle.cs.mcgill.ca/moodle