Decision Making in Robots and Autonomous Agents

The lectures will be held in Room G.3 in the Bayes Centre, on Fridays. The lecture time will be 11:10 - 12:00 and 12:10 - 13:00
We will upload reading materials to this web page throughout the semester, aiming to make slides and readings available by the day before the lecture.

Lecture Slides and Handouts

Date:
Lecture content:
Assignments and Deadlines:
January 18
Introduction
PDF Slides
February 1
Model-based Control and Architectures for Task Encoding
PDF Slides
Optional Reading (Dynamics and ODEs): D.W. Jordan, P. Smith, Nonlinear Ordinary Differential Equations, 3rd ed., Oxford University Press. See sections 1.1, 2.3 - 2.5, 10.1.
Optional Reading (Case study: Pendulum): B.J. Kuipers, S. Ramamoorthy, Qualitative modeling and heterogeneous control of global system behavior. In C. J. Tomlin and M. R. Greenstreet (Eds.), Hybrid Systems: Computation and Control, Lecture Notes in Computer Science, Volume 2289, pp. 294-307, Springer Verlag, 2002.
Optional Reading (Case study: Juggling): R. R. Burridge, A. A. Rizzi, D. E. Koditschek, Sequential composition of dynamically dexterous robot behaviors, Int. J. Robotics Research, Vol 18, Issue 6, pp. 534 - 555, 1999.
Optional Reading (mainly FYI, not needed for lecture): J. Pratt, C.M. Chew, A. Torres, P. Dilworth, G. Pratt, Virtual Model Control: An intuitive approach for bipedal locomotion, Int. J. Robotics Research, Vol 20, Issue 2, pp. 129 - 143, 2001.
Homework 1 announced: PDF file with questions
February 8
Dynamic Programming and Decision theory
PDF Slides
February 15
Game Theory and Decentralised Decision Making
PDF Slides for Part 1: GT
PDF Slides for Part 2: MRS
Optional Reading (Multirobot systems): M.B. Dias, R. Zlot, N. Kalra, A. Stentz, Market-based multirobot coordination: A survey and analysis. Proc. IEEE 94(7):1257 - 1270, 2006.
Homework 1 DUE
February 25

Homework 2 announced: PDF file with instructions
March 1
Probabilistic methods for robotics
PDF Slides for Part 1: Bayes filters and exploration
PDF Slides for Part 2 (by authors of the paper): Bayesian search case study
Reading: L.D. Stone, C.M. Keller, T.M. Kratzke, J.P. Strumpfer, Search for the wreckage of Air France flight AF 447, Statistical Science, Volume 29, Number 1, pp. 69-80, 2014.
Optional Reading (Prob. methods): S. Thrun et al., Probabilistic Robotics, MIT Press, 2006. (Ch 2, 17)
Term paper topics list announced: PDF file
March 8
Worked Examples Session with TA
PDF Slides with introduction and questions
Solutions to the questions
March 15
Safety, Security and Privacy: Introducing the Issues
PDF Slides for Part 1: Safety
PDF Slides for Part 2: Security and Privacy
Optional Reading (Safety report example): Waymo's safety report, and ONR's guidance on safety cases
March 22
Explainability and Behavioural Aspects of Choice
PDF Slides for Part 1: Explainability
PDF Slides for Part 2: Behavioural Aspects of Human Choice
Optional Reading (explainability): Koh, Pang Wei, and Percy Liang. Understanding black-box predictions via influence functions. Proceedings of the 34th International Conference on Machine Learning, 2017.
Homework 2 DUE
March 29
Safety, Privacy and Explainability: Special topics + Recap and Instructions for Exam
PDF Slides for Part 1: Special topics - safety and security
Remarks on Exam and Q+A: See Learn
April 5
Student Presentations on Term Paper
Term Paper DUE


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