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COURSE DESCRIPTION

I. Objectives
This course has two objectives:

To know what a robot is, what its various parts are and how to build a robot.

To program a mobile robot to perform a specific task. In our case, we want to program a robot so that it can navigate in an office building, while avoiding obstacles and people in the corridors.

II. Prerequisites
To take the class you must be ready to use C or willing to learn it on the fly, and must be willing to work hard on the exciting projects.

III. Course Structure

Build your own robot. The first three-four weeks students will be taught from the MIT 6.270 notes and from the book [Jones \& Flynn]. During these four weeks students will be required to also read the materials at home. They will learn the basics about the mechanical aspects of robot building by constructing a robot body using Lego blocks and adding a microprocessor board, sensors, and the motors to make it autonomous. During the first three weeks students will learn the microprocessor's programming language and experiment with gear configurations and sensor reading interpretations to design a robot that can operate succesfully on its own. The students will spend the fourth and the fifth week in formulating a strategy and completing the robot that will eventually compete in a series of 4-5 tasks in a pool table-like arena. (The arena is in the robot lab in Room 118 of the Computer Science building.) The tasks will be of various degree of complexity: from simple tasks such as following a line, and climbing a slope, to tasks such as getting out of a maze, reaching a goal area in presence of various known obstacles, collecting small boxes in a home area, and getting to a destination in presence of unknown obstacles that are randomly placed. There will be several contests corresponding to the different tasks during the last three weeks. As in the MIT contest, at the end of the eight weeks the robots built and programmed by the students will compete against each other in a final contest.

Use the real thing. The lack of adequate amount of memory and structural integrity makes it hard to write sophisticated programs and adapt the Lego robot to a real environment. The next part of the course deals with these concerns. Students will be given a built platform (We have three such robots -- Pioneer, Nomad Scout and B-14). and they will be required to program these robots so that it maneuvers around a real environment such as a corridor with possible obstacles (trash cans, furniture etc.). These robots have on board laptops and/or radio modems that can be hooked to a computer. This will allow students to write larger programs (larger than the ones used by the lego robots).

IV. Home Works and Projects.
There will be a few home assignments, but several programming robot building projects.

V. Grading.
The home work will constitute 20% of the grade, and the projects 80% of the grade. Policy on Late Assignments: If an assignment is handed out late, then you will receive 50% credit. This means that if the assignment was out of 20 points, and you scored 16, then you will get only 50% of 16, i.e. 8 points. Assignments handed in later than one week after the due date will receive no credit.

VI. Text. The principal text will be the MIT 6.270 notes, the operation manual of the Nomad Scout mobile robot and Chapter 9 of the book ``Mobile Robots'' by Jones and Flynn. We will also study several papers  (mostly from past AI magazines) that describe mobile robots that were successful in past AAAI/IJCAI robot building contests. We will be giving a lot of handouts!

VII. Instructor.
Dr. Vladik Kreinovich.
Office: COMP. 215, Phone: (915)-747-6951
(emails preferred. Use the phone as a last resort only.)
Electronic mail: vladik@utep.edu
Office hours: To be announced.

T.A. Raúl Trejo.
Office: COMP. 202,
Phone: (915)-747-5596
Electronic mail: rtrejo100@utep.edu
Office hours: To be announced.

VIII. Website.
The website for this course is http://cs.utep.edu/robotics/CS4390.