Introduction to Vision and Robotics

Here are links to the course home page and the formal TQA description.

Description

Robotics and Vision applies AI techniques to the problems of making devices capable of interacting with the physical world. This includes moving around in the world (mobile robotics), moving things in the world (manipulation robotics), acquiring information by direct sensing of the world (e.g. machine vision) and, importantly, closing the loop by using sensing to control movement. Applying AI in this context poses certain problems, and sets certain limitations, which have important effects on the general software and hardware architectures. For example, a robot with legs must be able to correct detected imbalances before it falls over, and a robot which has to look left and right before crossing the road must be able to identify approaching hazards before it gets run over. These constraints become much more serious if the robot is required to carry both its own power supply and its own brain along with it. This module introduces the basic concepts and methods in these areas, and serves as an introduction to the more advanced robotics and vision modules.

Syllabus

The issues addressed will include the following:

• Applications of robotics and vision; the nature of the problems to be solved; historical overview and current state of the art.
• Robot actuators and sensors. Parallels to biological systems.
• Robot control: Open-loop, feed-forward and feedback; PID (proportional integral differential) control.
• Image formation, transduction and simple processing; thresholding, filtering and classification methods for extracting object information from an image.
• Active vision and attention. Range sensing.
• Sensors for self monitoring.
• General approaches and architectures. Classical vs. behaviour-based robotics. Wider issues and implications of robot research.

Assessed Coursework

A report on a practical project and a research review exercise.

References:

*** Russell & Norvig: Chapters 24 and 25 in Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach. Prentice Hall International Editions, 1995.

** R. R. Murphy: Introduction to AI robotics, A Bradford Book. MIT Press, 2000.

** Ramesh Jain, Rangachar Kasturi and Brian G. Schunck: Machine vision. McGraw-Hill, 1995.

* Nevins and Whitney: `Computer Controlled Assembly', in Scientific American, Feb 1978.

* Phillip J. McKerrow: Introduction to Robotics. Addison Wesley, 1991.