1. Robotics In which agents are endowed with physical effectors with which to do mischief.

2. Introduction Robot Institute of America defines robot as a reprogrammable, multifunction manipulator designed to move material, parts, tools or specific devices through variable programmed motions for the performance of a variety of tasks. Russell and Norvig: an active, artificial agent whose environment is the physical world. Robots differ from Softbots whose environment consists of computer systems, databases and networks.

3. The Physical World The physical world is very demanding, it is: inaccessible - sensors are imperfect, only stimuli that are near the agent can be perceived. nondeterministic - a robot needs to deal with uncertainty nonepisodic - effects of an action change over time dynamic - robot needs to decide when to think and when to act immediately continuous - states and actions are drawn from a continuum of physical configurations and motions

4. What are robots good for? Manufacturing and materials handling

5. What are robots good for? Gofer robots Bell & Howell Mailmobile

6. What are robots good for? Gofer robots Carnegie Mellon’s Nomad

7. What are robots good for? Hazardous environments Lunokhod Moon Robot

8. What are robots good for? Hazardous environments Dante II Frame Walking Robot

9. What are robots good for? Telepresence and virtual reality The Wheelbarrow, a bomb disposal robot

10. What are robots good for? Telepresence and virtual reality Advanced Tethered Vehicle (ATV)

11. What are robots good for? Telepresence and virtual reality Advanced Robot and Telemanipulator System for Minimal Invasive Surgery (ARTEMIS)

12. What are robots good for? Augmentation of human abilities Sigourney Weaver in the movie Aliens

13. What are robots good for? Augmentation of human abilities General Electric’s Walking Truck

14. What are robots made of? Effectors: Tools for Action Locomotion Manipulation Sensors: Tools for perception Proprioception Force Sensing Tactile Sensing Sonar Camera Data

15. What are robots made of? Effectors: Locomotion Carnegie Mellon’s Ambler

16. What are robots made of? Effectors: Locomotion MIT’s 3D Hopper

17. What are robots made of? Effectors: Manipulation Degrees of Freedom

18. What are robots made of? Sensors: Proprioception MIT’s Spring Flamingo

19. What are robots made of? Sensors: Force Sensing MIT’s Phantom

20. What are robots made of? Sensors: Tactile Sensing MIT’s Planar Grasper

21. What are robots made of? Sensors: Sonar ActivMedia’s Peoplebot

22. What are robots made of? Sensors: Light Sensors Grey Walter’s Tortoise

23. What are robots made of? Sensors: Camera Data The Johns Hopkins Beast

24. What are robots made of? Sensors: Camera Data MIT’s Fast Eye Gimbals

25. Architectures The architecture of a robot defines how the job of generating actions from percepts is organized. It is basically the control mechanism of the robot. Classical Architecture Situated Automata

26. Architectures Classical Architecture A robot with classical architecture is given a number of low-level actions (LLAs). It then uses these LLAs to reason about the effects of performing a sequence of these LLAs. The problem with this is that due to things like wheel slippage and measurement errors any lengthy sequence of actions is prone to fail.

27. Architectures Classical Architecture SRI’s Shakey

28. Architectures Situated Automata The process of deliberating is often too expensive to generate real-time behavior. Situated automata do not explicitly reason, they operate by reflex. A situated automata has two parts. The first collects sensor inputs and updates the state register accordingly, the second looks at the state register and calculates output (actions). Thus a situated automata does not plan, it just does whatever it knows to do given the state it is in.

29. Architectures Situated Automata SRI’s Flakey

30. Configuration Spaces Configuration Space is the path where robot can move from one position to another. Generalized configuration space Recognizable sets

31. Generalized configuration space Configuration Spaces Generalized configuration space includes other objects as part of the configuration, which could be movable, variable in shapes (i.e. scissors or staples), or deformable (i.e.string or paper).

32. Recognizable Sets Configuration Spaces Includes envelope of possible configurations

33. Navigation and Motion Planning Cell decomposition Skeletonization Fine-motion (Bounder-error) planning Landmark-based navigation Online algorithms

34. Navigation and Motion Planning Cell decomposition Breaks continuous space into a finite number of discrete search problems Bell & Howell Mailmobile

35. Navigation and Motion Planning Skeletonization methods Computes a one-directional “skeleton” (subset) of the configuration space, yielding an equivalent graph search problem

36. Navigation and Motion Planning Fine-motion (Bounded-error) Planning This methods assume bounds on sensor and actuator uncertainty, and in some cases can compute plans that are guaranteed to succeed even in the face of severe actuator partial knowledge of the environment is known to the system most of the planning is done offline used for planning small, precise motions of assembly

37. Navigation and Motion Planning Landmark-based navigation This method assumes that there exists some regions in which the robot location can be pinpointed using landmarks, whereas outside those regions it may have only orientation information This method is both sound and complete The plan have at most n steps if there are n landmarks

38. Navigation and Motion Planning Online algorithm The robot makes decision at run time (no need for offline planning This method assumes that the environment is completely unknown The robot cannot see anything. It can only sense a boundary The robot is equipped with a position sensor and knows the location of its goal.

39. The End