Intelligent Autonomous Robotics

Semester 1 2017/2018

Fourth year honours / Level 10 Official course descriptor

Note this course is not 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 1.27
Phone: 651 3453

Lecture times: Mondays 9am and Thursdays 9 am, Semester 1, 2.11 Appleton Tower

Lecture topics and handouts

Formative feedback: the lectures will regularly include example exam questions for you to attempt, with either immediate verbal feedback to the group, or model answers provided on the website before the next lecture. You should use these to assess the progress of your understanding in preparation for the exam. Note that the practicals (more details below) are also designed to consolidate your understanding of key concepts in the lecture material.

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 (10%), week 5 (10%) and week 9 (30%). You can access the robot lab to work on the practicals at any time (except when other classes are scheduled in the lab) but there will be a weekly scheduled session (from weeks 1 to 8) which you are expected to attend.

Details of the task, deadlines and feedback process.

Location: Robotics Teaching Lab, level 3 Appleton Tower

Times: (TBC) 4-6pm on Tuesdays from week 1

You will work with a partner. If you do not have a partner, please come along and you will be assigned a partner at this session.

If you miss this session due to late enrolment in the course, please contact the demonstrator as soon as possible.

Demonstrator: Jane Loveless

Year guide for fourth year students

Last update: August 28, 2017.


Home : Teaching : Courses 

Informatics Forum, 10 Crichton Street, Edinburgh, EH8 9AB, Scotland, UK
Tel: +44 131 651 5661, Fax: +44 131 651 1426, E-mail: school-office@inf.ed.ac.uk
Please contact our webadmin with any comments or corrections. Logging and Cookies
Unless explicitly stated otherwise, all material is copyright © The University of Edinburgh