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Intelligent Autonomous Robotics

Semester 1 2012/2013

Fourth year honours / Level 10 Official course descriptor

Note this course is no longer offered at level 11. MSc students interested in this topic should look at Robotics: Science and Systems

Lectures:

Lecturer: Barbara Webb
To contact: bwebb@inf.ed.ac.uk
Office: IF 1.40
Phone: 651 3453

Lecture times: Mondays 9am and Thursdays 9 am, Semester 1, (location changed to) AT 2.14
Note there is no lecture on the first Monday of the semester. See week one special arrangements.

Lecture topics and handouts

Required reading: Valentino Braitenberg `Vehicles: Experiments in Synthetic Psychology', MIT Press, Cambridge Massachusetts, 1984 (ISBN 0-262-52112-1 paper). Copies are available to borrow from the course lecturer. This is an entertaining and short book, which can be easily read in one evening.

A useful textbook is Seigwart, R. and Nourbakhsh, I.R. `Introduction to Autonomous Mobile Robots', 2nd edition, MIT Press 2011 (the 1st edition, published 2004 is equally useful for most topics in the course)

For additional background reading, we recommend:
`Behavior-based Robotics' by Ronald C Arkin, MIT press, 1998.
`Probabilistic Robotics' by Sebastian Thrun, Wolfram Burgand and Dieter Fox, MIT Press, 2005.

Further specific references will be given in lecture notes.

Practical Exercises

This module is assessed both by examination (50%) and practical reports due in week 3 (5%), week 5 (5%) and week 8 (40%). You can access the robot lab to work on the practicals at any time, but there will be a weekly scheduled session (from weeks 2 to 8) which you are expected to attend.

Details of the task and deadlines.

Location: Robotics Teaching Lab, level 3 Appleton Tower

Times: 1-3pm Monday & Tuesday (students should attend only one session per week)

Demonstrator: Alex Davies

Year guide for fourth year students

Last update: September 1, 2012.