COMP417: Intro to Robotics and Intelligent Systems, Winter 2017

Overview

This course provides an introduction to robotic systems from a computational perspective. A robot is regarded as an intelligent computer that can use sensors and act on the world. We will consider the definitional problems in robotics and look at how they are being solved in practice and by the research community. The emphasis is on algorithms, probabilistic reasoning, optimization, inference mechanisms, and behavior strategies, as opposed to electromechanical systems design. This course aims to help students improve their probabilistic modeling skills and instill the idea that a robot that explicitly accounts for its uncertainty works better than a robot that does not.

Course Description

This course will broadly cover the following areas:

• Kinematics and Dynamics: how can we model robotic systems using approximate physical models that enable us to make predictions about how robots move in response to given commands?
• Feedback Control and Planning: how can we compute the state-(in)dependent commands that can bring a robotic system from its current state to a desired state?
• Mapping: how can we combine noisy measurements from sensors with the robot’s pose to build a map of the environment?
• State Estimation: the state of the robot is not always directly measurable/observable. How can we determine the relative weighs of multiple sensor measurements in order to form an accurate estimate of the (hidden) state?
• The Geometry of Computer Vision: how can modeling pixel projections on an RGB camera help us infer the 3D structure of the world? How can we triangulate points seen from two cameras? How can we estimate the camera’s pose (and therefore the robot’s) while it is moving in the environment?
• (Intro to) Reinforcement Learning: how can we learn the parameters of a state-dependent controller without having a prior physical model of the robot’s dynamics? This is an enormous research field, with many exciting results. In this course we will only have time to see two algorithms.